Instagram takes a Snapchat approach

On Tuesday, Instagram introduced Instagram Stories, which lets people share photos and videos that have a life span of no more than 24 hours with friends who follow them.

The service bears a striking resemblance — some might say it is a carbon copy — to Snapchat Stories, a photo-and video-sharing format where the stories also disappear after no more than 24 hours.

Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of Instagram, did not mention Snapchat by name in an interview about Instagram Stories, but obliquely referred to “competitors” and acknowledged that “other companies deserve all the credit” for popularizing disappearing photos and videos.

When Instagram began nearly six years ago as a photo-sharing app — the first photo shared on the service was a square, semi-blurry photo of a dog, poorly framed and with little evidence of retouching — it became a place for people to publicly store their pictures and memories.

The private messaging service, with its disappearing photos, was the opposite of the public nature of social-media services like Instagram.

Snapchat, based in the Venice Beach neighborhood of Los Angeles, is now valued at about $19 billion and has released a number of advertising products, which brands have eagerly latched onto to experiment with video and facial recognition ads.

Snapchat Stories, a departure from the company’s original direct messaging service, has been a hit for essentially acting as a 24-hour photo and video diary viewable only by those who follow the user.

Instagram has also faced reports that the service has had a decline in photo sharing on its network in recent years, a worrisome trend for the company.

[...] he said the narrative string of photos and video that disappear after 24 hours is a format, akin to the cascading feed-based model popularized by companies like Facebook and Twitter and eventually adopted by countless others.