Today Instagram revealed a new approach to search and discovery that may finally enable the photo-sharing app to spotlight news and information as it’s happening—the kind of easy-to-use, broadly universal service that Twitter always wanted to offer. “This is our North Star—what we’ve been shooting for all along,” Instagram cofounder and CEO Kevin Systrom said during an interview last Friday. “It’s a real-time visual pulse for what is happening in the world.”
The new Explore page, which users find by clicking the magnifying glass to the left of the center “camera” button, offers users three ways to surface content.
First, Instagram will highlight trending places in a box across the top of the screen. The software will show you both the most attention-getting events (Houston flood; Bonnaroo concert) and also things that are close to you (Central Park concert; new restaurant opening). Second, users can scroll sideways to see curated collections of photographs that members of Instagram’s community team cull from the most popular Instagrammers’ feeds. This is where you’ll stumble across your kid skateboarders, say, or remote islands you’ll dream of visiting. Last, Instagram will highlight trending hashtags in the center of the screen, promoting the most popular tags. The bottom third of the screen will look much like it has, surfacing compelling posts, but Instagram’s new design will allow users to move seamlessly from one photo to the next, rather than returning to the Explore page between photos.
While Explore will initially be available only to US users, Instagram will introduce a more powerful search engine globally. Currently, when users look for specific topics, they’re directed either to people or hashtags. Instagram’s upgraded tool will let users look for places as well, and the results will show all of these categories at once. Do you want to know if there’s snow up at Tahoe before you drive several hours to go skiing? You can now reliably search “Snow Tahoe” and see up-to-the-minute photos of the mountain.
Systrom and I discussed the new features last Friday, just as the Golden State Warriors, having won the NBA Finals for the first time in 40 years, kicked off their victory parade. He pulled up the Explore page, and trending hashtags surfaced #warriorsparade. With one tap, Systrom pulled up a stream of short videos and images of jubilant fans celebrating in the street. “It’s a 100 percent visual experience that is more efficient than TV,” he said.
This kind of real-time visual stream was the goal all along, he explained. Early on, he and cofounder Mike Krieger “had this vision that if we could grow large enough and have a system that allowed people to tag who they were with, they could see what is happening right now.” He used the example of Hurricane Sandy, a storm that decimated parts of New York City two-and-a-half years ago. Even back then, traditional media outlets featured images from Instagram as part of their storm coverage. “But if you wanted to see photos, you had to know Sandy [was happening in the first place] and and to go look for that hashtag,” said Systrom. “We want to be the first place to cover it, and to have broad reach to cover the real things happening on the ground.”
In other words, Instagram is looking to outdo Twitter--to become the first destination for anyone who wants to document or surface news and information.
Instagram is roughly the same size as Twitter in terms of number of users. And those users do the same thing: log life experiences as they happen. But to date, Twitter has been a better outlet for news, because it has a more robust search engine and features that better surface relevant information. While photographers may post 70 million photos daily on Instagram, it’s been tough to figure out where the important ones are. In other words, everyone knows there’s a party, but no one can give you the address.
Discovery is the most crucial component for a real-time news service, and although Twitter’s features are more developed, the twittersphere remains long on noise and low on signal. It’s a problem, as my colleague Julia Greenberg wrote last week, and even as Twitter navigates a CEO change, it is racing headlong to address the issue. Instagram’s announcement arrives less than week after Twitter unveiled “Project Lightning,” a major new feature that will introduce live event-based feeds curated by human editors. Users can find these new feeds, which will likely roll out sometime later in the year, through a new button on the mobile app that will take them to a screen with a list of seven to ten events. These will include scheduled functions like the NBA finals as well as breaking news like the protests in Ferguson. Tap on any of these options, and you’ll land on a stream of photo and video tweets, each the size of your mobile screen (in other words, about the size of an Instagram post). Elect to follow an event, and the tweets will be blended into your timeline. When the event concludes, so do the tweets.
Instagram has some advantages over Twitter. For one, it began as a tool for visual communication, and as people talk to each other more through photos and videos, it grows more robust. Twitter has done a lot to make its service more visual but was born as a prompt to publish 140 characters of text. Instagram is also simpler to use; people new to the service don’t need to learn what RT (retweet) and MT (modified tweet) mean. They only need to sign up, select a few folks to follow, and snap a photo.
Both of these reasons likely contribute to the fact that Instagram continues to grow quickly, making it even more likely users will find just about anyone and anything they’re looking for. The service boosted its user base 50 percent in nine months last year, to 300 million in December, when it last released its user numbers. By contrast, Twitter’s growth has nearly stalled, having jumped just 18 perecent in a year, to 302 million. Comscore’s Andrew Lipman says that Instagram has higher engagement than Twitter among the US Internet users it measures.
Being owned by Facebook also gives Instagram the benefit of being able to draw from the networking giant’s resources to grow its business. But Instagram still employs fewer than 200 people and is helmed by its original founders. Meanwhile, Twitter is in the midst of a leadership change that could be distracting. Six years after assuming the CEO role, Dick Costolo will step down July 1. Original cofounder Jack Dorsey will serve as interim CEO while the company searches for a replacement, a process that could take a while. In a June 22 release, the company confirmed the potential CEO would need to make a fulltime commitment to Twitter (insinuating it won’t be Dorsey, who also tops Square), and that the company “will take the time necessary to find the right CEO.”
To be sure, there are more than two contenders for the role of "number one newswire" in the digital age. Snapchat has captured a generation’s attention with its Stories feature, which draws together photos snapped over a 24-hour period to create short, ephemeral narratives. And Instagram’s corporate overlord originated the News Feed, where regular headlines feature kindergarten graduations and rants about the merits of white women who pretend to be black, among other things. If Twitter loses its position as the world’s wire service, there’s no guarantee Instagram will land it.
The company’s newest features, however, could give it the lead. “The goal is to be really useful,” Systrom told me. When I pushed him to explain what he meant, he mentioned that last weekend, he’d decided to go for brunch. Yelp suggested a place close by, so he searched for it on Instagram and discovered that at that moment, there was a very long line. (When brunchers get bored waiting for their eggs, what do they do? Duh. Instagram pictures of themselves waiting.) He searched “brunch” on Instagram for other tasty alternatives and landed at a different place. “It was delicious,” he said.
