Tagging. They introduced tagging people in photos. Let's not make this out to be some crazy feature, it should be a core part of a photo-based social network.

As a non-user, I was a bit shocked that they didn't already have this feature.

Is it possible for someone to explain to a rarely-social-network-site-user what Instagram actually does?

All I know is it has something to do with photos.

But you already can upload photos to various social network sites (and could already upload photos way before this whole so called social thing existed).

And marketing talk saying how great photos are (which I think people knew 100 years ago too already) doesn't really help understanding it :)

So, what does it do? :)

Instagram is now Facebook Lite.

This is a great update. It makes me think that it was also a big Facebook business update that they have had. It obviously is just like Facebook tagging, in that sense, so I could see how it was probably a huge feature request to integrate it into their Instagram product.

I wonder if you start seeing some more Facebook media concepts transfer over to the Instagram product. Stuff like creating albums, doing videos (to compete with Vine, especially), etc.

I don't like the direction they took with this feature. From the screenshots it appears to place the tags on the photo itself, similar to how Facebook currently handles tags. This assumes that Instagram photos will have people in the photos. In my experience, this is often not the case and photos tend to be places and things. I do like the concept of adding a "Photos of You" section since I usually mention user handles in my caption. Prior to this feature, if you mentioned a user, they would get a notification and the photo would eventually get buried in your activity feed. Essentially this new section of your profile organizes all those mentioned photos into one easy to find place. I think they took an unnecessary extra step with the tagging IMHO

I'm surprised no one is talking about the fact that this is a pretty clear shot across twitter's bow. Users are trained to tag friends in instagram shots using twitter handles, and to generate hashtags for locations and events. This encourages users to move away from that dynamic - effectively removing a large transmission mechanism for instagram via tweeting. Yes, you'll still tweet the pic (maybe), but those in the pic won't be notified.

Very clever move to hurt a competitor while boosting internal engagement.

Any tagged Photos of You are public, by default.. You can approve them first, but you have to turn that option on. This sounds like a potential privacy issue..

All these naysayers about Facebook's malicious intentions in here, but I think this is actually a very intuitive feature for Instagram that a lot of users thought should have been a part of the app from the start. I'd be surprised if this weren't a feature that Instragram founders always intended to rollout. I don't think this is necessarily the beginning of Instagram's demise through Facebook's corruption of the app.

Anyone have an idea what the usage stats for instagram are these days?

I've seen a massive drop off on Facebook. It's gone from my news feed more or less just being instragram pics... almsot everyone using it... down to about 3 regular people. It feels to me like everyone I know has stopped using it, unless Facebook is deliberately hiding pics.

Wow this is some pretty cutting edge stuff.

Awesome. This is incredible. I have dreamed about this feature. This is the disruptive technology we need. I'm certain my 97 year old grandmother will be using Instagram now. More social. Cutting edge. Invest now people.

Facebookification of Instagram, and it brings a neat feature. It makes Instagram more social... Now I can see my mom using Instagram.

This is one of those features that I always thought Instagram should have.

Clever move.

Next one is merging Facebook accounts and Instagram accounts; and then boom, they have a clean dataset ready to merge into Facebook.

Instagram can finally be a full part of Facebook, and the Instagram that we know (and, for some of us, love) will be finally completely gone.

Instagram's user profile page seems to be broken right now

ooo oooo Niche Alert* run a contest insta-scam, and woefully have people tag your spam page for free airline passes, or gucci bags.

internet == selfies