Less than a year after launching the Stories on its application - following the success of those on Snapchat - Instagram seems to be already better than its competitor in the development of this feature. With more than 200 million people using stories every day, Instagram now gives even more space to its favorite option. On May 23, the company introduced two new features: Geolocated Stories and stories based on a hashtag. Together, these innovations will ensure users never run out of photos and videos to discover. Ironically, this announcement arrives the same day as the presentation of the new options of the Snapchat stories.
Geolocated stories, wherever you are
With this innovation, deployed right now on the application, users can find a story created especially for each city, each remarkable place, each local sign. They are fed by the content published by the users in their own story using the stickers of location, which will automatically classify the contents in the good public story.
Users can see that an item in their story was used in the geolocalized story by viewing the list of people who viewed their story.
Thematic stories, thanks to old hashtags
In the same way, the Thematic stories, based on a hashtag and which will come out "in the coming weeks", according to Instagram, will be fuelled by the stories of users who have used the hashtags.
As for geolocated stories, they will be offered to users according to their habits and interests. Stories privacy settings do not change. Thus, public accounts publications will appear in any thematic or geolocalized story. But the contents of the private profiles will only be visible to their subscribers.
Humans versus algorithms
"The only way to be sure to offer you great content is to make a selection with algorithms and as the penultimate update of Snapchat, the new Instagram stories are entirely managed by algorithms. They customize stories based on user interests, based on tracked accounts and those with which users interact most.
We use a variety of signals, and we have a great understanding of the content you like or dislike," says Blake Barnes, Instagram's product manager. "So we take a lot of this knowledge and apply it to the stories."
"One of the most important things for us is to make sure that these innovations extend to the whole world," he continues. "The only way to offer you excellent content for every city, every place, every bar around the world is to make a preference with algorithms. For this, the approach is different from Snapchat, which is based on human curators to feed the public stories. These stories are then more emphasized on the app than those created, thanks to the algorithms," he added.
Instagram put everything on the stories since they were launched on the application. The social network now intends to attract more users on its stories, especially if it is possible to look endlessly.
