The Instagram DM says more about Snapchat than it does about Twitter
The race to corner private photo messaging is on
Instagram founder Kevin Systrom wants a private form of photo messaging as his ‘super addictive platform’ grows.
“One of the really important things about this feature was easy access,” Systrom told a room of social media journalists as he demonstrated the new Instagram Direct feature, which allows users to send photo messages to a ‘favorite’ group of followers and friends.
The ability to send private messages is a feature Instagram’s 150 million-strong users have requested since its inception. But today’s announcement says more about the people who flocked to services like Snapchat than it does about Instagram’s own users. Rather than Twitter and Instagram acting like each other, both platforms are hoping to snag a bit of the audience they lost when they refused to distribute enhanced private tools until now.
Snapchat has been cagey about releasing demographic information, but one of the few metrics confirmed is that more than 400m ‘snaps’ are sent by users each day. Beyond that, there’s relatively little we know. Snapchat’s 23-year-old founder Evan Spiegel has also turned down a $3b buyout offer from Facebook (Systrom, 28, sold his company to Facebook last year for a startup-paltry $1b). Snapchat also poached Instagram’s head of advertising last week.
Like Instagram Direct and Twitter’s recently-announced photo direct-messaging tool, Snapchat has allowed users control over private photo sharing since the beginning; that’s sort of the point of the entire platform. Users can select from a ‘favorite’ list of contacts, like Instagram Direct, or send directly to only one user, like Twitter’s photo DM. Now that control is something that bigger players, once so focused on public sharing, are chasing down in earnest. In November, John Herrman at Buzzfeed called Snapchat’s success in the face of a $13.5m round of funding with few publicly released numbers on usership a ‘mirage’, but he did get Spiegel to confirm a crucial metric: 88 percent of snaps are delivered to a single recipient.
The social news feed experience is often criticized as being too overwhelming and temporal, so it’s ironic that the one feature Facebook, Instagram and Twitter do offer over Snapchat is the ability to archive and thread conversations. But as Facebook in particular faces a drain in youthful users, it’s clear the ability to publicly store social activity is less appealing than it used to be.
“[Snapchat’s] a platform where they can communicate and have fun without any anxiety about the permanence,” Snapchat investor Bill Gurley said in October. “You hear about kids not getting jobs because of what’s on their Facebook page.”
All of this threatens to deem the Facebook-owned Instagram antiquated by association. What remains to be seen is if a community of 150 million users can generate a noteworthy amount of private photos — the problem is that the rest of the world could already be calling those photos ‘snaps’ by the time Instagram catches up.
