Facebook-owned Instagram is undergoing major changes under the banner of version 7 of its mobile app. The company has announced two major feature updates to Search and Explore sections which aims to make search for specific images and discovery of new ones easier.
You can now look for images by their location as well as by people and tags on the images. The Explore page will showcase trending tags and places. The trending images will be from both – local and global trends.
At the top of the Explore page, you will find new section of curated collections which will be updated regularly. It will showcase selected accounts, places and topics as a collection. These fresh Explore page roll-outs will only be available in US,initially. But, the company will introduce a new powerful search engine globally.
Instagram will also highlight trending hashtags at the screen’s center to promote the most popular tags. Instagram currently has hashtag feature but you need to know what you are looking for. With this new highlighted hashtags feature, you will be able to find interesting and engaging stuff easily.
Even though there are huge number of images on the platform, we were living in our small world of people we follow and what they share. With new features, the app will acts as a news source, travel guide, visual discovery platform and more.
Instagram’s announcement arrives in less than a week after Twitter unveiled its “Project Lightning”. It is a new feature from Twitter which will introduce live event-based feeds curated by human editors.
While Instagram did witness a decent user base increment by 50 percent in a span of nine months last year, it still fails to compete with the likes of the impact created by a relatively lesser used Twitter. However, leveraging the advantage over 70 million images and videos which are being post on Instagram daily, it seems to be a good move from Instagram to showcase good content of its platform to keep users engaged.
The new update will start rolling out from today on both Android and iOS platforms. There is no information about when these features are coming (if at all) to the web.
