Privacy scare is high in the virtual space lately and rightly so. Incidents of personality theft and phishing on virtual media platforms are only rising with every passing day. As a result, it’s become imperative for various social media platforms to up their privacy. Having said that, Instagram’s announcement about two-step verification for its users comes less as a surprise and more as a welcome, much-awaited development.
Instead of requiring only the username and password to log in, this two step verification would also require a unique code to log into Instagram. There has to be a verified mobile number mentioned in your account details. When you try to log in, a code would be sent as a message to this number which would then be required to log in.
If a hacker does indeed end up with your account details, the new security tool would ensure that you are still protected by way of a code sent on the verified mobile number. If your Instagram account is about posting pictures of your last meal, you can ignore this update and move on. But if there truly are some trade secrets hidden behind those pictures, it is for you.
As Instagram continues to increase its user-base, with many celebrities and businesses using official Instagram accounts, this new verification process is a relevant development. Users can definitely feel safer about their Instagram identity now.
Instagram has today after a long delay added support for multiple accounts. This comes after months of testing of the particular feature. It is being rolled out with the latest update to the app, Version 7.15 which is currently rolling out for users on the iOS and Android platform.
This functionality can be availed by going to the options page and from there clicking to the ‘Add Account’ button at the bottom. After adding multiple accounts, users can switch between them by simply clicking at an account name and switching to it.
To the credit of the developers of the app, they have also added the support for push notifications for all linked accounts. Functionality to log out of one or all accounts at once at the click of one button has also been rolled out in the update.
Addition of support for Multiple accounts on the native app will make it more difficult for third party Instagram apps to survive now as the native app will carry the one feature that most users used third party apps for.
If reports are to be believed, the the new Instagram app version 7.12.0 on Android might begin supporting multiple accounts on one device. This is the first time, since its inception, that Instagram has even thought of the possibility of multiple accounts.
However, not everyone who downloads the newest version of the app will receive this feature as it is still being rolled out in stages. Additionally, Instagram has not made any official statement yet. In case you did receive the update, then you should see an “Add Account” option under the “Clear Search History” option on the settings list. This basically means that you can now add or create another account to use simultaneously with your present account already logged in.
As of now, iOS doesn’t seem to have this feature even if they also have the same Instagram 7.12.0 version. If you want to check whether you have this feature, click here to update; and don’t forget to let us know about it.
The internet has been abuzz with rumours suggesting that Instagram was experimenting with 3D advertisement techniques in order to exploit Apple’s 3D Touch and the Apple Pay technology on the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.
According to rumours, Instagram was believed to be working on this new project in order to increase its financial gains. They wanted to do this by allowing users to make purchases directly from Instagram using Apple Pay and Force Touch.The iPhone’s new Force Touch technology would now offer Instagram users more than just two options -to buy or browse- when tapping on the Shop Now button to purchase a product. Easier shopping options would mean increased sales on Instagram, and therefore higher profits for the company.
The Force Touch feature, first introduced in the Apple Watch and the new 13-inch MacBook was recently also unveiled in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. ‘Force Touch’ is a feature that differentiates between three different kinds of touch, as opposed to two, and responds accordingly. A user can perform various tasks in a much simpler and more efficient fashion.
However, unfortunately for iPhone users, Instagram has rubbished all these rumours and explicitly said that are not working on any such innovation currently. Oh well, no harm done anyway except that iPhone 6s and 6s Plus users would have to carry on with the traditional ways of retail transactions, for now.
Hashtags are the necessary evil of social media, the quicksands you try to resist with all your might even though you know you are going to be pulled deeper the more you struggle. You continue to struggle anyway, until you give in. Almost every social media denizen goes through the same process of hating hashtags with a passion, and eventually willingly incorporating them in their internet-lingo.
Hashtag on chalkboard
Origin of Hashtags:
Twitter is assumed to be the genesis of this little virtual entity, though no one can pin-point to a specific person, time or day when hashtags came into being. Now they are used to search for topics of interests on social media platforms like Twitter and WordPress, draw traffic to your blogs and annoy everyone in your friend-list with a score of hashtags for a picture of your breakfast.
The Most Popular Hashtags on Instagram:
Believe it or not, #boyfriend happens to be one of the top 50 hashtags on Instagram. And no #cat is not part of this list. Here’s a list of the top ten hashtag on Instagram.
#fashion
#friends
#smile
#like4like
#instamood
#family
#nofilter
#amazing
#style
#sun
News and Updates Via Hashtags:
Hashtags allow users to stay abreast of all that’s happening in the world. Specific interests in sports or films can be taken care of with the help of hashtags like #cannes2015 or #worldcup2014. Cuing in these hashtags on a platform like Instagram would take you to hundreds and thousands of images on the topic.
Voicing Opinions:
In terms of social change, hashtags have played a big role. Even celebrities have taken to the internet, using hashtags to draw attention to important issues like gender equality, or to speak out against anti-social activities.
Actors David Tennant and Tom Hiddleston took to the internet to talk about feminism and gender issues in the pictures above. Emma Watson is another actor who used hashtags to raise awareness about the abduction of about 200 hundred girls by Boko Haram.
Both of the above hashtags, #heforshe and #bringbackourgirls have gone insanely viral on social media in the past with people all over posting pictures with the tag. Similarly, 2014 saw the usage of #illridewithyou to show support for Australian Muslims using public transport.
Acceptance of These Little Devils in Our Lives:
Following suit with the word ‘selfie’, hashtag was added in the Oxford English Dictionary in June last year. Also, a collaboration of Twitter with American Express allows individuals to purchase goods online on discounted prices. These are just some of the examples of how hashtags are part of our lives now and they are here to stay.
Who is to say the pictures of your pet, the last meal you had or that new haircut selfie would have been the same without a dozen hashtags? Here’s to hashtags and all that they’ve done for our virtual selves.
Over the past few months, Instagram has been playing around with some new features to bring the app out of a stale mode. A couple of months ago, the photo-sharing app introduced a landscape feature that helped Instagram break free from its traditional square photos. Last night, Instagram brought a new feature that allows users to make GIF-like videos that go forward and backwards in a loop.
The standalone app is called ‘Boomerang’ and it is available for iOS and Android users. The app is very easy to use. It takes a burst of 10 photos and turns it into a 1-second video loop. So if you find something moving and feel it would make for a fun, interesting loop, just point and shoot and the app will do the rest. Once your GIF-like video is ready, you can share it on Instagram or Facebook.
Photos can be taken in portrait or landscape mode and the final video will be saved to your camera roll. The app is fast and simple to use and doesn’t require users to have Instagram accounts.
Facebook-owned Instagram introduced the new app last night in a blog post. “Transform an ordinary selfie with your friends into a funny video. Get that exact moment when your friend blows out his birthday candles, then watch them come back to life again and again.” Watch the video below to get a better idea of how Boomerang works.
https://vimeo.com/143161189
Boomerang is the third standalone app introduced by Instagram. Last August, it introduced ‘Hyperlapse’ for time lapse videos using stabilization technology, and earlier this year it came out with ‘Layout’ that lets you create photo collages.
The app is kind of like Apple’s new Live Photos feature on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus that takes Harry Potter-esque moving images. Instagram is looking to make its five year old photo sharing app vibrant again with Boomerang. The idea is to bring something new that will especially attract the teen demographic. At only 12.1 MB, the app is super light and a delight to use. Download the app now and look for moments around you worth capturing and repeating.
Facebook-owned Instagram hit the 400 million mark today. The photo-sharing sharing app posted a celebratory picture and stated that the 400 million strong user base has about 75 percent living outside the US.
“Among the last 100 million to join, more than half live in Europe and Asia. The countries that added the most Instagrammers include Brazil, Japan and Indonesia”
The new 100 million users helped Instagram race ahead of twitter, which is currently at 316 million active monthly users. Facebook is surely reaping from the benefits from buying Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 now that Instagram has also taken to advertising. Research firm eMarketer estimated that Instagram’s ad revenue will reach about $1.5 billion in 2016 and $2.8 billion in 2017. Instagram has credited Facebook for the rise in users.
The recent option that allows for portrait and landscape photos along with your standard square pictures has received positive response from existing users and has surely played an integral part to rope in more people. Instagram also made changes to its Direct messages page last month which now allows threaded messages. Pictures can be sent privately without having to start a new thread every time.
Instagram poses as a strong competitor to Twitter. Both social media platforms are slowly delving into territories that are blurring the differences between them. Twitter had announced recently that it plans to hand-curate live event coverage in a project called Lightning. However, Instagram already launched new live events features in its Explore page back in June. While Twitter is turning more visual, Instagram is focusing more on events.
Despite some major improvements, Instagram is far from perfect. The main feed has not seen any improvement for a long time now. The main feed show pictures that are too big to navigate properly. An overview of popular pictures that you missed would be ideal. None of these constraints, however, have come in the way of Instagram reaching 400 million followers.
This is the day we had hoped would never come – after cluttering our newsfeed on Facebook with “suggested posts”, it’s now Instagram’s turn to push sponsored pictures.
The first ad which appeared is by Instagram itself, announcing that within the next few weeks we’re going to see multiple unwanted posts on our homepage. These ads will come with a sponsored label and you can tap it and hide the ad if it doesn’t interest you. According to the company, even if you opt out of seeing a certain type of ads, you will still see ads based on your activity on Instagram
To show the sponsored posts that would be relevant to a particular person, Instagram will use the information about they do on Instagram as well as Facebook (its parent company) as well as information from third-party sites and apps used.
Ask anyone who is a regular Instagram user, what they like most about the app, they will tell you it’s the clutter-free interface. Instagram is not too worried about losing its followers, though. This may be good news for retailers and Instagram as they will see their fortunes rising. However, we don’t know if this is a positive or negative development for its users.
We’ve all taken that magnificent picture of a scenic view and instantly shared it on Instagram. Till yesterday, we could only share either the top half or the bottom half of that beautiful scenery, because we had to conform to the blooming square frame that Instagram insisted, we use. Well, now that’s changed for good.
Instagram announced that in addition to square posts, you can now choose a portrait and landscape mode to suit your pictures and videos! This comes as a relief to many Instagram photographers who would get frustrated with the space restriction that was earlier imposed on them.
Square format has been and always will be part of who we are. That said, the visual story you’re trying to tell should always come first, and we want to make it simple and fun for you to share moments just the way you want to.
The popular photo-sharing, social networking service, fully understood the nuances of the square format and have tweaked it, in order to improve the quality of pictures and to also enhance the cinematographic content of the videos going up. They stated, “Once you share the photo, the full-sized version of it will appear to all of your followers in feed in a beautiful, natural way. To keep the clean feel of your profile grid, your post will appear there as a center-cropped square.”
To add to the good news, Instagram is also making all its filters available for all moments, whether it’s a photo or a video. So, now, you have the liberty to pick and choose as you wish. To learn more about the changes in today’s update, check out the Instagram Help Center.
Instagram for iOS version 7.5 is available today in Apple’s App Store, and Instagram for Android version 7.5 is available today on Google Play.
Instagram is an awesome app to share your memories in the form of pictures and videos. For as long as we can remember, Instagram was stuck with the 640×640 pixel resolution. But now, with the latest update, everything is about to change. With phones of the modern era capable of handling the high level of pixels, Instagram is finally upgrading to HD.
The latest report from Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger says the update will be rolling out to both Android and iOS. The company says the new highlight has been spreading out for a week, and most users should start seeing the change slowly. It should be noted that the new feature does not come in the form of an app update, but instead, changes have been made on the server side.
Back when Instagram launched in 2010, 640 by 640 pixels was a fair size for photos that would ultimately end up on an iPhone because Instagram was an iOS-only app at first. As the years have moved on and smartphones developed towards large display sizes, much more accurate resolutions, as well as high-resolution cameras, the size restraint was often probed by tech bloggers and regular users alike.
Given its popularity, one might think that Instagram was earning millions of dollars through its followers. But what sort of an app will earn money if its only function is uploading or liking pictures? It barely earned a penny. Then, in 2012, it got a push because Facebook bought it for a billion dollars. However, the income was still meagre. Now in 2015, this is why it’s going to change:
Instagram will finally allow a fully operational Ad business, providing shopping links with their posts, aided by Facebook targeted groups. Yes, this means that Instagram, will now have a ‘Shop Now’ button that will link you to what you want to buy.
Earlier, Instagram had 475 campaigns with huge companies like Gap, Disney and other retailers, however, they wouldn’t provide links to buy the product outside the app and these companies would have to collaborate with third party services. Now though, we will be able to see purchase details of all commodities below the pictures and videos a company posts, and we’ll even be directed to the site of purchase.
Instagram plans to use Facebook’s 2 million advertisers to facilitate this new feature and it is certain that companies too, are ecstatic about the new development.
“It’s an ideal platform to shop on as it’s so visual and fashion oriented,” said Old Navy media director Michele Schuh in an email to Adweek.
While it will be very convenient to find the cost of a Michael Kors bag or the price of GAP t-shirts, below the picture, it will also mean that the number of ads is bound to increase. And we know how annoying that can be.
Instagram is not too worried about losing its followers, though. It is said that they have a new API in place that will allow marketing partners to automate ad responses. This means that advertisers can reach all age groups on Facebook and target their interests as well. In addition to this, they are working on making each ad fit seamlessly into your feed so that it causes minimum disturbance while you’re scrolling through your friends’ posts. So we can expect that there will be no pop-ups in the near future, at least.
This spells good news for retailers and Instagram as they will see their fortunes rising. However, we don’t know if this is a positive or negative development for its users.
What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below.
In a first, Instagram, the world’s most popular photo-sharing app, has allowed emojis to be used in/as hashtags. The app has also added three more filters, namely Lark, Reyes and Juno.
Before, you could add an emoji to captions, but they could not be searched as a hashtag. But now, the new update will allow you to hashtag a particular emoji that can be searched just like any other hashtagged word. Also, if you previously had tagged an emoji, it can be searched now. Instagram explains the change in its official blog:
Over the past few years, emoji have become part of a universal visual language. And just as we share photos and videos, we use emoji to communicate emotions and feelings in ways that anyone can understand, regardless of language or background. With emoji hashtags, you can discover even more by adding them to your own photos and videos, searching them on the Explore page and tapping on them when you see them in captions.
Talking about the new filters, Instagram, has been inspired by adventure outdoor looks. Instagram blog states they are “a family of modern, subtle filters that brighten and enhance your photos in refined, beautiful ways”.
Lark filter desaturates red colour and while raising the blue and green hues. Reyes gets back the retro look in the picture while Juno taps at cooler tones of colour for a vibrant picture.
Instagram, the photo sharing app has been growing rapidly. It has overtaken Twitter in terms of the number of subscribers on its service. Its success has lead to a number of third party apps which let users add elements like collage, stickers and other add-on’s on their “grams”. The company has now introduced a new standalone app called Layout which lets users create collages from their camera rolls.
We checked it out, so you didn’t have to:
With Layout, Instagram seems to want to take on the multiple apps that its subscribers use for their photos on the service. Instagram users have been found to proactively use apps like Pic Stitch, Pic Collage, InstaCollage, PhotoGrid, and others. By having its own collage making app, Instagram can keep those users in its own ecosystem.
The first thing you see when you get into the app is the camera roll. Here you can select the pictures you want to include in your collage. Once you select the images you want to use, Layout gives you custom layouts that you can choose from. At once, a user can select up to 9 images. Each selection is instantly visualized in the photo grid.
Choose a layout
Instagram wanted to give a better user interface to the users in comparison to the conventional collage makers in the app store. Layout packs in unique features like faces, photo booth and easy to use editing options.
With Faces, you can filter out the unwanted snaps in your camera roll and keep only the ones with people’s faces in them. Instagram found that 90% of all the collages on its service consist of faces, so it makes it easy for users to skip through the random WhatsApp images and only have pictures with people in it.
Choose a layout
The Mirror feature
The Mirror Feature
Easy Sharing
The Photobooth feature was essential for an app like Instagram and its one of the most fun things to do at a party. The photobooth button on Layout starts a countdown timer and then takes a bunch of images which are laid out on the grid.
Layout makes editing the collage real easy. It offers intuitive options which most users will find easy to use. It lets you pinch and zoom the images to define the size and also enables you to pan the snaps. A replace option allows you to go back to the photo roll to change an undesired image. Layout also allows you to mirror the images and add some creative elements to your collages.
Once your images are done, you can save them on your device or share them on your preferred social networks including Instagram. At present Layout is only available for iOS users but it will be available for Android soon.
When we speak of Instagram, the first thing that hits our mind is a picture-oriented app that narrates stories by means of single pictures. It has been designed to upload one picture at a time with a little description if you want. But now, Instagram is changing the very base of its foundation to help advertisers describe stories through multiple pictures.
The online mobile photo and video-sharing app has debuted a slideshow feature called ‘carousel’ that lets users view to flick a series of photos. From now on, a series of dots will appear below the post to depict that it’s a carousel. One can swipe the pictures left and right to see more images.
The facility to load multiple photos at a time is restricted to advertisers only.
The company wrote on its blog post:
One way to look at it is carousel ads bring the potential of multi-page print campaigns to mobile phones—with the added benefit of taking people to a website to learn more.
Also, there is a ‘learn more’ button at the bottom of the dots that takes user to the advertisers’ website. The format is still not fixed and the company is working for a more systemic and appealing design. The new button will directly push a huge chunk of customers to the advertised website, profiting their business.
The spokeswoman of Instagram announced that it was cracked for brands for experimental purpose, “Once we iterate and see how people engage with the content, [we] may explore the possibility of bringing it to other types of users on Instagram.”
Well, this clearly shows that a stable version for users will soon follow. You can watch the below video to have a clear picture of how carousel works:
Instagram, now owned by Facebook, started out in 2010 primarily as a photo sharing service. The Video sharing feature was introduced in the 2013. Despite timelapse apps being introduced, Instagram was still best known for photos.
Instagram introduced a new update for its video feature that may prove beneficial to advertisers. It may seem that Instagram might have been inspired by Vine, a video sharing service, who had introduced the loop feature back in 2014.
Videos uploaded on Instagram will now loop continuously from the start till the end, and cannot be paused in the middle until scrolled down. This would ensure that the user would actually watch the videos, including the video ads, in their feed.
This update is seen like a gift for advertisers, who believe that this will boost the probability of their videos on Instagram to be seen by Instagram’s 300 million users worldwide. Instagram also assures that the looping videos won’t consume more data than its previous format.
