Adam Mosseri, Chief Executive Officer Instagram, ended 2021 by summarizing some of the improvements that would come to the application throughout the year. The manager highlighted news in the direct messages section, and explained that the company was working on features to make this section a definitive alternative for communication between users. Months later, those features that Mosseri promised have begun to arrive on the social network. Now, users can reply to messages without having to go to the inbox, take polls in direct messages, share music with friends and much more.
Instagram, specifically, has announced up to seven new features that are integrated as of today in the direct messages section. One of them is the possibility of reply to messages directly from the feed. That is, the user will be able to continue browsing the publications and reply to a chat without having to access the inbox. This will also prevent you from losing the content you were viewing at the time.
Related to the answers, now Instagram also offers the possibility of send silent messages so that the recipient does not receive a notification, for example, in the wee hours of the morning. In this case, the sender must put “@silencio” next to the message that he wants to send. On the other hand, the user can see more easily which people are active in the app. These will appear at the top of the direct message tray.
Instagram also wants to strengthen the interaction through direct messages with a series of new features. One of them —and probably the most interesting— is the possibility of share music via chat. To do this, the platform now allows you to link an Apple Music or Amazon Music account (and soon, Spotify), with which the sender can share a song that the recipient can listen to. The platform, however, only plays a 30-second snippet of that song.
Users can also create and send survey stickers in groupsas well as share posts of Instagram through direct messages in a much faster way. In the latter case, it is only necessary to press and hold the share button that appears at the bottom of the photo or video and select the user in the preview. Lastly, Instagram has added a new chat theme called ‘lo-fi’. This, according to the company, will make conversations “feel more personal.”
All of these enhancements to direct messaging will start rolling out today, though for now, in select countries. Instagram, however, has confirmed They plan to expand these features to more markets in the near future.