Photo app updates: Instagram adds live video, Snapchat-style messaging

 

 

The highly-popular social media app, Instagram, has been updated with two new features. The first of the additions is live streaming. It's very simple to start live streaming from your phone as you only tap the start live video button in the camera menu and then you are good to go. When live streaming video, the feed can be shared for up to an hour after which the stream is then gone forever. You can tell when someone is streaming because the word "Live" will be underneath their Instagram Stories profile picture at the top of the screen.

The second addition is to the Instagram Direct messaging service within the app. Much like the popular Snapchat application, users will now be able to send their friends images that automatically delete when read. Also like Snapchat, Instagram will notify users if someone replayed or took a screen capture of the disappearing message that was read. As Fstoppers notes in their coverage of this, Instagram Direct has become a very popular aspect of Instagram with over 300 million users taking advantage of the feature every month.

 

Instagram Direct messaging has been enhanced with the addition of Snapchat-style disappearing messages

You may recall us briefly covering Polaroid Swing back in July, but the app has taken off since being recently featured in Apple's App Store and it is worth bringing attention to again. Polaroid Swing allows users to capture micro videos, one second clips which appear as still images, but can be manipulated to show the captured video clip by swiping on the image or tilting your phone. If you haven't checked the app out before, now is as good a time as any. Polaroid Swing is available for free on iOS and an Android version is in the works.

(Seen via Fstoppers)