Instagram Launches Stories, CEO Gives Credit to Snapchat

Instagram has announced a brand new feature – Instagram Stories!

The feature works a lot like Snapchat and allows you to share moments to your profile and have them disappear after 24 hours. There will be a bar at the top of your news feed showing you all the stories from people you follow. You are able to send a private comment on a story to your friend, but there are no public comments or likes for stories.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom is giving credit to Snapchat for the new feature.

“They deserve all the credit,” Kevin told TechCrunch. “When you are an innovator, that’s awesome. Just like Instagram deserves all the credit for bringing filters to the forefront. This isn’t about who invented something. This is about a format, and how you take it to a network and put your own spin on it. Facebook invented feed, LinkedIn took on feed, Twitter took on feed, Instagram took on feed, and they all feel very different now and they serve very different purposes. But no one looks down at someone for adopting something that is so obviously great for presenting a certain type of information.”

“And I think what you see is that every company looks around and adopts the best of the best formats or state-of-the-art technology. Snapchat adopted face filters that existed elsewhere first, right? And slideshows existed in other places, too. Flipagram was doing it for a while. So I think that’s the interesting part of the Valley. You can’t just recreate another product. But you can say ‘what’s really awesome about a format? And does it apply to our network?’” Kevin added. “Don’t you think that Snapchat’s done a really awesome job? And Facebook’s done a great job. And Instagram’s done a great job. I think all of these companies have done a great job. Some people invent stuff. We’ve invented things.”

See screenshots of the new feature in the gallery!