Instagram reaches 600 million milestone

Relaxnews

Instagram has seen 100 million new users sign up over the past six months, pushing its total base to more than 600 million.
The image sharing social media platform announced the news on its blog on Thursday, thanking users and adding: “we’re working to make Instagram safer than ever for connection and self-expression.”
Recent updates to the platform
include the addition of features such as ‘Instagram Stories’, live video and disappearing photos. Earlier this week the company unveiled a new ‘saved posts’ feature for users to bookmark material. The social network introduced a new ‘Saved Posts’ feature that lets users bookmark photos to view later.
The platform has added a new icon to posts to its 10.2 version, allowing users to save images to a private tab on their profile, visible only to them.
The news comes days after Apple revealed the social media app was its fourth most downloaded in 2016, following Snapchat, Messenger and Pokemon Go. Instagram 10.2 is now available for iOS, Android and Windows 10. Instagram had recently added live video for Instagram Stories and Explore, and disappearing photos and videos for Instagram Direct in a November 21 update.
The live video feature bears comparison to that found aboard Facebook and rival platform Twitter, while Snapchat has made temporal messaging one of its core characteristics.
Live video for friends and followers can stream up to an hour’s footage, with notifications alerting friends to the event and the power to pin or even turn off comments given to the live feed’s host.
The disappearing photos and videos feature is for use in groups and between individual friends via the Instagram Direct channel, Instagram said in a November 21 blog post.
They are only available for use
between an account and its followers, disappearing from friends’ inboxes after being viewed, and letting the creator know who replayed or screenshotted the message; both
features are to roll out over the next few weeks. On the same day, Snapchat parent company Snap opened a
boutique store in New York dedic-ated to selling its video-recording glasses, Spectacles.