Notes, Instagram‘s status update feature, will soon have a larger presence within the app. Notes were previously only accessible through Instagram’s inbox, but soon users will be able to see the quick updates directly on their profiles.
The modification ought to improve the feature’s exposure and offer users a new platform for interacting with their friends’ posts. (In December, Instagram gave Notes the ability to reply.) Similar to the cooperative “add yours” templates for Stories, the app is also experimenting with “prompts” for Notes, which will let users offer questions for their friends to respond to in their updates.
Notes are similar to Stories in that the updates only stick around for 24 hours, though they are only visible to mutual followers, so they aren’t meant to be as widely shared as a typical grid or Stories post. The latest updates are another sign of how Meta has used the feature, first introduced in 2022, to encourage users to post more often for smaller, more curated groups of friends.
Separately, the app is also adding a new “cutouts” feature, which allows users to make stickers out of objects in their photos, much like the iOS sticker feature. On Instagram, these stickers can be shared in Stories or in a Reel. Cutouts can also be made from other users’ public posts, effectively giving people a new way to remix content from others (Instagram’s help page notes that users can disable this feature if they prefer for their content to not be reused.)
