Beiruting News

In a bold expansion designed to capture more of users' everyday photos and videos, Instagram today introduced "stories," a secondary feed of ephemeral content that is available for only 24 hours from the time of posting.

The feature is nearly identical to the central feed in Snapchat, which is also called stories and which helped supercharge the company's growth rate after it was introduced in 2013.

Encouraging users to post more frequently - and more candidly - about their lives, Instagram's introduction of stories could fundamentally change the nature of an app that has 300 million daily users.

Stories, which rolls out today on Android and iOS, places a new row of circular avatars at the top of your Instagram feed.

Each bubble represents an account that you follow on Instagram, and contains every photo and video clip (up to 10 seconds) that they've posted to their stories feed within the past day. (The avatars are displayed according to an algorithm that attempts to show your favorite accounts first.) Tap a bubble and their story will open in full screen, advancing automatically with a slick rotating cube effect.

Unlike Snapchat, you can tap on the left-hand side of the screen to rewind the feed back to an earlier post.

Unlike the main feed, there are no hearts or other feedback mechanisms inside Instagram stories. But as on Snapchat, you can reply to stories with text messages - here they'll appear inside the Instagram Direct mailbox. Swipe up on your own story and you can see a list of people who have viewed your story; you can also block individual users from being able to access your story on that screen. If your Instagram account is public, your story is public, too - and you can creep on someone's public story without following them by tapping on their profile photo. If your account is private, though, only accounts you approve can see it. And if you're particularly satisfied with one of your story posts, you can promote it to the traditional Instagram feed by swiping up on it and tapping the share button.