Its been two months since Snapchat released the Stories Search feature. It has also been well over the time it usually takes for instagram to cop a good feature from Snap. Well, not one to disappoint users, Instagram is rolling out Location Stories to its Explore page.
So Story search is actually pretty interesting. All of the publicly posted Stories are tagged with a location sticker. Now, you can perform a search and see what is happening at say, the Times Square at the present instance of time. The feature let you check out snaps from total strangers and in the way, ensured that folks at interesting places, tool a lot of pictures.
Now Instagram Stories is pretty similar. However, the word around town is that the company could use location as a pretext to launch a stories search that also takes hashtag or keywords. So instead of searching for a location, you could also search for a hashtag or Keyword and get much the same result.
Of course, with the advances being made in technology,Instagram could take the task of naming and attaching keywords and tags upon itself — using the power of machine learning and image recognition. This would help the company make its platform more interesting, as people would be able to search for stuff and come upon all sorts of interesting stuff — thus increasing view time, and revenue.
A crucial difference that we see in how Instagram and Snapchat are presenting these stories to users lie in the privacy. Stories have to be voluntarily submitted to the Snapchat “Our Story”, before they would appear on the global search. Instagram on the other hand, makes your content publicly available a long as it has the location sticker over it. This could well lead to privacy concerns and Instagram might want to rethink its strategy before long.
