COURSTEY Nov 22 2016 : The Times of India (Ahmedabad)
Insta adds live video, disappearing photos
Mike Isaac
San Francisco:

For the last six years, Instagram has been a repository for users' picturesque moments. But 2016 has been a year of reinvention for the photo-sharing social network, and now the Facebook-owned platform has rolled out two new features.
On Monday , the company unveiled one feature focused on live video and one on ephemeral messaging. Both tap into a type of sharing popularised by companies like Snap Inc., which runs Snapchat, and Twitter, in its live-strea ming video app Periscope.“We want Instagram to be a place where you can share all of your moments, to create a pressure-free space to do so,“ said Kevin Weil, head of product at Instagram. Weil said that this philosophy , and the feature choices that stem from it, would encourage people to use Instagram for more than the selected, highly polished feeds for which it is known.

The new features will on ly heighten Instagram's rivalry with Snap Inc, which is particularly notable as Snap recently filed paperwork to go public.

Instagram's live-video feature lets its users broadcast live video to their followers through the Stories section of the app. Friends and followers watching Instagram live videos can comment and send cartoon hearts to the broadcaster during the stream. But live Instagram videos are meant to be fleeting and cannot be saved to watch later. That gives broadcasters room to express themselves more fully , Weil said.

Instagram's other feature, disappearing photos and videos within the company's private messaging tool, will be available to all its users. While an ephemeral live broadcast may be seen by many , disappearing messages are for the few, usually friends or family in a tighter circle than the wider audience.