Social media
Instagram starts extending Story videos to 60 seconds
It’s just one of many changes afoot as the platform tries to catch up to TikTok.
If you thought your college acquaintance’s 15-second clip of fireworks was a lot, just wait until Instagram Stories gives you a full, uninterrupted minute of the show. 9to5Mac reports that a user in Turkey was notified that instead of breaking Stories up into 15-second segments, Insatgram will now let them go for up 60 seconds. There’s no word yet on when this change might roll out to everybody.
Instagram seems to be taking its lead from TikTok, which has extended its video-length limit from 15 seconds to one minute to where it stands now, at three minutes.
Just this week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced changes including “reply with Reels” (which mimics TikTok’s video replies), “IG Playback” to revisit your year in posts, and a tool to embed an Instagram profile onto websites. The week before, it rolled out optional reminders for users to take breaks.
Going chronological— Meanwhile, in a bit of good news, Mosseri recently said that the company is going to ditch the algorithmically sorted feed — which has been widely disliked by users since its 2016 introduction — and bring back the chronological feed.
Struggling to stay relevant— The flurry of updates comes as Instagram scrambles to remain popular among Gen Z. A survey published last month by Forrester shows that the app’s popularity is declining among teenagers, with 57 percent of American 12- to 17-year-olds using the app weekly — down four points since last year — compared to 63 percent using TikTok.
