Instagram Said to Add Private Messaging Feature

Instagram has been busy lately upgrading the app with new features: The short-form video feature was one of them, and it was introduced earlier this year. But that’s not enough. The developers say they want their rapidly growing user base to stay on the app much more. And how will they do that? By adding more features, and GigaOm’s Om Malik has just heard whispers about that forthcoming upgrade.

Instagram currently has 200 million users and counting. It has become popular very fast as it stepped into the mobile world as a visual communication platform. Now, in addition to the recently added short-form video feature, Instagram allegedly plans to add messaging.

Well-placed sources tell us that the company is gearing up to launch new private messaging features inside its still red-hot photo and video sharing service. It is also experimenting with the idea of group messaging, our source tells us. The new features are likely to find home in the next version of Instagram, which is expected before end of the year.

As Malik’s “well-placed sources” say, Instagram is ramping up to add another private messaging feature onto the app that will allow its users to share photos and videos.

As Malik puts it, messaging on Instagram could make sense: First there were the images, then the videos, and now the app has evolved into “something that creates social connections between people and has led to an entirely different kind of social graph,” he says.

It remains to be seen whether Instagram users would want to use the app’s messaging instead of their own convenient tools to interact with their family and friends. This, obviously being if the rumours about messaging on Instagram materialize.