Coming soon: Instagram Favorites lets you post to a select group of people
When Instagram isn’t stealing Snapchat features, they’re constantly testing new features to make the photo sharing service more appealing to users. Their latest scheme currently in testing is a feature called Favorites that essentially allows you to choose a group of people to privately share photos with. It’s sort of like a group chat, only without all the back and forth that typically goes on in those. It’s a greater level of control to fine tune your audience and that’s a good thing.
Users can still share publicly with a handful of close friends, allowing them to comment on photos, like, or whatever. Instagram says this new idea is in response to users trying to “hack” the service by creating private accounts with smaller, closer friends. This is simply Instagram recognizing that and creating a solution of their own.
Right now, it’s only rolling out to a small subset of users. You’ll know if you’re in the test group when you create a post or story and you see the new option to share to your favorites. You can add as many people to this list as you’d like and they’ll know they’ve been added by a “favorites” badge that appears in the corner of the post. Your profile will also have a new Favorites tab for photos/videos you’ve posted amongst this select group of people.
Although users wont be notified when they’ve been added to your favorites, they might notice if they no longer see a green badge on your photos or the favorites tab on your profile is suddenly blank (this is how it appears to outsiders). There’s also no way for users to request to be added to someone’s favorites, so you’ll just have to pester your friends in the DMs.
Again, this feature is still in testing and has been for awhile now. Although there’s no guarantee it will ever roll out to everyone, Instagram is working hard to make sure they dot all t’s and cross the i’s.
via The Verge