Prime Highlights:
- Instagram introduces global Repost, Live Location Map, and Friends tab on Reels to enable more social interaction.
- The feature makes Instagram more socially discoverable, friend-based, and personal.
Key Fact:
- The new features are not required and are joined by privacy controls and parental guidance for teenagers.
- They can share publicly available posts and Reels and view what they and their friends like and interact with.
Key Background:
Instagram is introducing a trio of three social-first features that will increase the app’s sociality, community-drivenness, and connectivity. They are the long-awaited “repost” feature, a “Live Map” for friends based on Snap Map, and a new “Friends” tab in Reels highlighting what users’ best friends are watching.
The repost feature lets users repost publicly accessible Reels and feed posts to followers, and the content remains in the profile’s “Reposts” tab and follower feeds. It is a less intense type of promotion and creates a feeling of personal commentary with the optional support of captions. This is Instagram’s take at doing Twitter-style retweeting but more controlled in exposure.
Instagram’s Live Map feature lets users opt-in to share their latest active location with friends voluntarily. It also labels Reels and Stories from local creators or even at local spots. Similar to Snapchat’s Snap Map, this feature enables real-time content discovery with controls over flexibility, including parental control for managed accounts.
Under the Reels tab, a new “Friends” tab allows people to see Reels that their friends have commented on, liked, or shared. This adds a personal, socially mediated discovery experience—allowing people to find content about them via peer-to-peer engagement. People can also hide their activity or silence others for greater control.
Though the introduction is framed as a move toward greater friend interaction and social discovery, it has come under criticism for the platform’s growing practice of copying others’ features. But the revision constitutes a basic departure from Instagram’s visually-driven roots in favor of a social-first direction, with an emphasis on rethinking one-to-one relationships in an algorithmic setting.