The ever-changing world of social media
The ever-changing world of social media
Arab News:
Its polaroid-like application icon was a special one. It somehow rekindled the flames of good old times with the family on a picnic trip. Just over night that popular icon ceased to exist. As of last Wednesday, Instagram — the most popular photo-sharing platform on the planet — changed its logo in the latest update on both iOS and Android.
As usually happens with such changes, users immediately started criticizing the new sleek, simple, multicolored and modern design of the logo and demanded the return of the old one.
The reason for this big change, according Instagram’s head of design Ian Spalter as reported by Mashable, was to bring the design more in line with the aesthetics of the apps’ users.
“The Instagram logo and design was beginning to feel, well, not reflective of the community, and frankly we thought we could make it better.”
The first word that comes to one’s mind on seeing the new logo for the first time is simplicity. It is so simple to the point some users started to mock that it looks like it was designed on one of the Microsoft products back in the 1990s.
Nevertheless, simplicity was what Instagram exactly aimed for. “We’ve made improvements to how the Instagram app looks on the inside as well.
The simpler design puts more focus on your photos and videos without changing how you navigate the app,” the company announced in a blog post after the release of the new logo design.
“The Instagram community has evolved over the past five years from a place to share filtered photos to so much more, a global community of interests sharing more than 80 million photos and videos every day. Our updated look reflects how vibrant and diverse your storytelling has become.”
Despite the logo design, which people will adapt to eventually anyway, there are more important changes coming to the platform. One of those is the change expected in how the posts would appear on the timelines of users. The platform is moving away from a chronological order timeline into a more Facebook-like timeline where posts appear based on algorithms predicting the users likes and previous engagements.
For small business owners using Instagram as their main marketing channel, like a lot of businesses here in the Kingdom, this could be a bad news.
Once the new algorithm is in place, they should no longer expect to appear on the timeline of the few people who follow them in a hope to reach more and more users.
Creativity in driving users to engagement would be the secret to success.
It is something that proved itself very hard on the timeline of Facebook, and it is creeping now into the world of Instagram.
As usually happens with such changes, users immediately started criticizing the new sleek, simple, multicolored and modern design of the logo and demanded the return of the old one.
The reason for this big change, according Instagram’s head of design Ian Spalter as reported by Mashable, was to bring the design more in line with the aesthetics of the apps’ users.
“The Instagram logo and design was beginning to feel, well, not reflective of the community, and frankly we thought we could make it better.”
The first word that comes to one’s mind on seeing the new logo for the first time is simplicity. It is so simple to the point some users started to mock that it looks like it was designed on one of the Microsoft products back in the 1990s.
Nevertheless, simplicity was what Instagram exactly aimed for. “We’ve made improvements to how the Instagram app looks on the inside as well.
The simpler design puts more focus on your photos and videos without changing how you navigate the app,” the company announced in a blog post after the release of the new logo design.
“The Instagram community has evolved over the past five years from a place to share filtered photos to so much more, a global community of interests sharing more than 80 million photos and videos every day. Our updated look reflects how vibrant and diverse your storytelling has become.”
Despite the logo design, which people will adapt to eventually anyway, there are more important changes coming to the platform. One of those is the change expected in how the posts would appear on the timelines of users. The platform is moving away from a chronological order timeline into a more Facebook-like timeline where posts appear based on algorithms predicting the users likes and previous engagements.
For small business owners using Instagram as their main marketing channel, like a lot of businesses here in the Kingdom, this could be a bad news.
Once the new algorithm is in place, they should no longer expect to appear on the timeline of the few people who follow them in a hope to reach more and more users.
Creativity in driving users to engagement would be the secret to success.
It is something that proved itself very hard on the timeline of Facebook, and it is creeping now into the world of Instagram.
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