Putting the lie to the motto “The early bird wins the race” in a characteristic display of blunt force, Instagram’s Stories feature has crossed 200 million users. This milestone is particularly important because it also means that the number of daily active Story users on Instagram has finally exceeded that on Snapchat, who actually pioneered the feature in the first place.
To put things in perspective, Snapchat had around 161 million Story users at the last count, when it unveiled some numbers at its IPO earlier this year. Interestingly, Instagram’s growth has been nothing short of explosive. The feature first launched in August and then went on to hit 100 million daily actives in October. In January, it equaled Snapchat’s tally of 150 million users and now, merely 3 months down the line it has managed to add anther 50 million to its ranks.
Instagram is also improving where its feature-copying abilities are concerned. Not only is it totally unapologetic about copying Snapchat’s features, it is also getting remarkably better at doing so. For instance, the company launched its own clone of Snapchat’s Pinning for text and stickers today. The feature allows you to chose augmented reality “3D stickers” and text which can be stuck to objects in videos.
The objects stay stuck and then move around with the object they are pinned upon. The feature is actually pretty clever and allows you to do a lot of interesting stuff like giving people smileys for their heads and so on.
Instagram also has its own copy of Snapchat’s scissors feature. This particular feature allows you to crop an image and then stick it on top of anything you would like. So basically, create your own stickers as you go. The company is adding yet another feature that allows you to use custom Geostickers that have been drawn by local community members for cities like Tokyo, Madrid, London, and Chicago.ig tha
Well, Snapchat really needs to do something. Clearly, launching new features isn’t working out and if Instagram’s rate of growth continues, it could well start stealing Snapchat’s features as well. It’s rate of growth has already tanked by over 82 percent since Instagram launched its stories feature.
