Aggregation of items is the new hit thing for social networks as they seek to make the incredible amount of information generated on their platforms useful to the rest of the users. Flipboard started with aggregating news then the rest like Google Newsstand and Apple News followed. Twitter has Moments and Facebook already has Instant Articles but has been testing a curated video feed.
Apparently, there is a pop up at the top of the feed on US users that informs you to watch videos that have been compiled around a certain theme. A spokesperson from Instagram explained to Recodeabout the new changes: “This is a new way to experience events and big moments, as they happen, through the eyes of the Instagram community”. The video content is curated by Instagram employees, in the same way videos on Moments and on Snapchat’s Discover are prepared. Unlike the videos that you usually see on your timeline, these videos don’t display the like count or caption, which reminds you of Snapchat Live Stories.
Instagram is not new to curating content. The company made a huge update back in June this yearwhere they introduced curated content on the also revamped Explore page. Adding a dedicated video feed would be a natural progression in that it will make it easier for the over 400 million users to keep tabs with what videos people are uploading about a certain theme.
The curated video feed is only being shown to US users just like the previous update about Curated Collections, which is a bummer really. We only hope it will be rolled out to other users in other parts of the world soon.
