Instagram is giving users a new way to communicate with their friends and followers. The Meta-owned app has brought a video feature to Notes, the super-short format it launched last year.
By using Notes, Instagrammers can author brief status updates to share with their mutual follows and the people on their Close Friends lists. Initially, Notes were limited to 60 characters and could only include text and emoji. The latest Instagram update adds videos into the mix, but Notes users will have to keep it brief. If you thought Vine’s six-second time limit was a tough restriction, you ain’t seen nothing yet: Video Notes have a maximum length of two seconds.
Those brief videos will be shared on a “Notes tray,” where they will be available for 24 hours after their publication. Instagram is also launching new ways to respond to Notes via Direct Messages. Note recipients can employ audio, photo, video, gifs, and stickers for those DM replies.
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The disappearing nature of Notes videos and their short-form runtime are details that are reminiscent of Stories, the ephemeral format Instagram copied from Snapchat in 2016. But the brief videos attached to Notes don’t seem like a serious threat to cannibalize Insta’s other short-form options. If anything, the two-second updates are reminiscent of BeReal, where users can respond to posts with customized reactions.
Instagram has already attempted to lift some of BeReal’s most notable features. When Notes arrived last year, the Meta-owned platform simultaneously rolled out Candid Stories, a take on BeReal’s time-sensitive social updates.
To publish video Notes, Instagram users must tap on their photo that appears in the Notes tray in their inbox. From there, a record button initiates the two-second window for a video update. Once Notes are published, recipients can reply by tapping the Note in question in choosing their preferred reply option (audio, video, sticker, etc.) More details about the Notes feature can be found via the Instagram Help Center.
