Instagram is launching the ability for users to post video Notes, the company announced on Wednesday. Notes is Instagram’s status feature that launched a year ago. Up until now, you could only post text or emojis to your status update. Now, you can post a two-second looping video Note that will be visible to your mutual followers or Close Friends for 24 hours.
Because Instagram already allows you to post video Stories, the new Notes update may be a bit confusing for users looking to share a video for 24 hours. But, given that two seconds isn’t that long of a time frame, video Notes probably won’t replace Instagram Stories. Another differentiator between video Notes and video Stories is that you can only post content from your front-facing camera when sharing video Notes. Plus, you have to capture the content in the app when posting a video Note, which means that you can’t upload a video from your phone’s camera gallery.
You can post a video Note by going to your inbox, tapping on your photo in the Notes tray and then clicking the camera button on top of your photo. From there, you can tap the record button to record a two-second video. Once you’re happy with the video, you can choose to add text and then post it.
Although your friends have already been able to reply to a Note using text, they now have more options to do so, as the social network is introducing the ability to respond to Notes using audio, photo, video, gifs and stickers. When you respond to a friend’s Note with something like a photo or a sticker, it will be sent to them as a DM.
When Instagram first launched Notes back in December 2022, the feature was seen as somewhat of a competitor to Twitter (now X), as it allowed users to communicate with others using just text. The feature came at a time when people were looking for an alternative to Twitter after Elon Musk purchased the social network. At the time, a report from The New York Times revealed that Meta was considering turning Instagram Notes into a more fully fledged Twitter rival. But of course, we now know that Meta found its Twitter competitor in Threads, which launched in August.
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