Popular photo-sharing service, Instagram rolled out two major updates to help its 300 million users connect to the world as it happens with the all-new Explore page.
Instagram has updated its "Explore" feature so users can quickly find real-time news and events as it happens, the photo-sharing app announced on its blog Tuesday, June 23.
Instagram never really found the correct blend of content that could make its "explore" section an important and useful part of the app, however that changed as Instagram 7.0 rolled out for iOS and Android.
With a brand-new explore and search update, Instagram now feel even more like a competitor to Twitter than ever before. Instead of showing just a grid of photos, the main explore view will now surface trending tags. When a user taps on one of those trending hashtags, it will show the most popular images up top, followed by a grid of all recently submitted images with a specific tag, The Verge noted.
Trending places too will get their own dedicated part of the explore section, plus, Instagram's search feature has also been updated to encompass places in search results along with the existing people and tags categories. Moreover, there's a way to search across all three categories at once, as Instagram brings the "top" results across the service.
No doubt, these two updates right away make the explore tab more useful than it used to be, especially for those interested in using Instagram as a way of finding images connected to events or places instead of a stream of pictures from their friends. The explore tab will now accommodate an array of curated image collections.
Just last week, Twitter announced its upcoming feature, Project Lightning, which track tweets along with videos and ample photos based on live events. This is the same trend that has made live-streaming app Periscope, which Twitter acquired earlier this year, according to reports on CNet.
Instagram CEO and co-founder Kevin Systrom told The Wall Street Journal, "People are hungry for what's happening right now in the world."
Systrom added, "All of us in social media and regular media, we're all competing for the same thing, which is this gap between something happening in the world and you knowing about it."
Clearly, Instagram wants to give its 300 million users the same kind of immediate update that Twitter delivers. However, those who like the old grid of photos from people they follow, it's still there just below the trending tags area and curated images banner.
