Facebook's popular photo-sharing app Instagram last week launched a video feature

Technology blog TechCrunch recently wrote that Facebook's popular photo-sharing app Instagram launched the video function last week to fight Vine, but the app didn't get any better, but it got worse and undermined the core user experience, It also had less than half a star in the App Store.

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Instagram, known for its picture-sharing, added a video feature last week to combat the fast-growing video-sharing app Vine by Twitter.

Become "video version Instagram"

More than a year ago, Hunter Walk, the former director of Google's product manager, Hunter Walker pictures and videos and explained in detail why it was extremely difficult to become a "video version of Instagram".

"Think about the images you see on your social Information stream or on a particular image site: 99% of them are interesting because the person or photographer in the picture is someone you know or yourself." Because the picture is static, you can either appreciate it, or you can quickly browse, which means that the ' cost ' of the picture is lower, so you will be interested in more pictures of friends. ”

However, Walker points out that video is not necessarily the case, because "the cost of watching video is much higher." "Viewers are much less willing to spend time looking for the best parts of the video, especially those that they don't expect," he said.

The problem with Instagram is that it does not fundamentally make video production more artistic or make video consumption more enjoyable. In fact, Instagram is looking for a handful of "features" that are added to vine differentiation-videos that are up to 15 seconds, not 6 seconds, and video filters-that have been done before.

Single purpose

In addition, the ability to cram video into an application that is dedicated to sharing images before a user can destroy everyone's core user experience.

Think about the best and most popular apps of the moment. Almost every one does the same thing and does it very well. Twitter, for example, provides a platform for publishing tweets to the world, Snapchat lets people share pictures with their friends, while Vine supports shooting and sharing short videos.

Instagram was also one of those apps that used to be purely a picture-sharing and browsing for friends. But today, the singleness of purpose has vanished as the video function increases. Users who have spent the past few years trying to sort out their favorite mobile photographer list have discovered in recent days that their Instagram apps are full of messy videos. Simply by introducing a small feature into its toolbox, Instagram makes those active users extremely uncomfortable.

Is Instagram still saved?

Just as other companies with a large user base have reacted to a major change in their applications or Web sites (such as Digg and Facebook), pundits, observers and users are not optimistic about Instagram's increased video capabilities. The video feature was launched only one day, and the app store scored less than half a star. More convincingly, most negative reviews are due to the fact that the video is crammed into the user's stream, or that the video slows down their browsing.

"They're doing this to fight Vine (and Vine owner Twitter), not to make Instagram better," Gruber, a technology blogger, said in a Gruber. The video feature actually makes Instagram worse, rather than better. ”

Some people think that those problems will be automatically corrected. Now everyone is flocking to Instagram to try to shoot the video, but over time people will stop experimenting and no longer upload bad video to the service. On the other hand, there will be more in-depth and more artistic videos coming up on the platform. By then, users will begin to feel that video in the Instagram stream is more valuable.

Others suggest that Instagram allow users to filter out video or display video and pictures separately in the information flow. This will allow those who are directed to the video function to be able to touch the video, but also for everyone to restore the previous only picture of the Instagram information flow.

This may lead to improvement, but it does not change the fact that Instagram is no longer the Instagram that everyone has been passionate about in the past few years. 130 million users all leave Instagram, looking for another picture sharing application is unlikely.

But perhaps they will gradually find themselves opening Instagram less often than before, and then find themselves sharing fewer times than before, and so forth.