Instagram gets its identity back

Meta’s social network is set to try and return to its roots with a series of changes.

Instagram has been making changes constantly for a long time, some of them sensible and others complete flops. But we’re not here to tell you what they’ve already done: today we bring you the new changes Meta’s app is proposing in an attempt to recover its identity.

The create button is back

They say going back to the beginning, back to your roots, is something we should all do in life. It seems the people behind this social network have heard that line somewhere, and the famous create-content icon came to mind.

Anyone who’s been poking around Insta forever knows what we’re talking about. An icon that probably never should have disappeared, since it was the simplest, most practical shortcut we had for creating any kind of content.

So in a few days, you’d better keep an eye on the shortcut bar at the bottom and see for yourselves that yes, it’s back, and let’s hope this time it’s here to stay.

But of course, when one door opens, others tend to close. And if Instagram is adding this icon, it’s almost certain that other elements will be sacrificed, or at least won’t stay in the same place.

Goodbye to the Instagram shop as we knew it

It looks like the shop icon will be saying goodbye for a while; we won’t see it in the little bar at the bottom of the home screen anymore. But don’t panic: you’ll still be able to buy and sell in shops on the platform just as before. And it doesn’t end there. The Bible says Jesus sat at the right hand of the Father. So they’ve decided that the best way to boost the creation and consumption of these videos is to move the “reels” icon, which will now sit to the right of the much-awaited create-content icon.

And yes, we know we’ve brought you three fairly major changes, but we can’t leave it there just yet. So please, nobody get dizzy, here comes the last of the changes Instagram will introduce this February.

Is Instagram giving up on posing?

Meta’s app has also noticed the boom BeReal has enjoyed in recent months. Perhaps this new idea and concept has awakened something new in people who are so active on social media. And of course, Instagram doesn’t want to be left behind and will throw itself into the competition with a few innovative features.

“Notes” and “Candid” are coming to Instagram to try to end BeReal’s dominance in this way of sharing moments at any time of day.

“Notes” will let people write a short snippet about anything and share it with their followers for 24 hours.

“Candid”, meanwhile, is basically a copy of BeReal. You post a story at a specific moment of the day, and to see it, others have to do the same.

If at the start of the article it looked as though Instagram wanted to return to its “roots” with the first changes we saw, I think that after seeing how blatantly they’re going to copy BeReal, they’ll stay right where they are. Not a step forward, not a step back.

Jack of all trades, master of none, but even so, we’ll have to wait until February to see whether these changes materialise and how they’re received by the public.

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