A new Instagram update for iOS will reduce the amount of Instagram photos cropping up in your Facebook Newsfeed. “Instagram likes and activity will no longer be shared on Facebook,” the update says.
This doesn’t mean you can’t see Instagram posts on Facebook. The option to manually choose to share Instagram photos and videos on Facebook is still available for iOS users. But Instagram took away the option to link accounts and automatically cross-post from Instagram to Facebook. So if your friend likes Kim Kardashian’s butt selfie on Instagram, you won’t get a notification about it on Facebook anymore. And your friend won’t have to suffer the humiliation of all of her Facebook friends getting updated about her love of seeing pert butts filtered with X Pro II.
Why would Instagram do this? After all, the photo-sharing app is owned by Facebook. It seems odd that they’d go for less synergy, not more. And this update is only for iOS, so Android users still have the option to automatically cross-post.
Facebook is working to “unbundle” its mobile experience, taking features like chat out of its primary mobile app to push users onto Messenger, its standalone chat app. Introducing updates that separate Instagram use and Facebook use may be part of that larger unbundling strategy. But I suspect a different motive. The automatic activity update was a crappy feature. People didn’t like that their Facebook friends could see what they liked on Instagram. It’s one thing to choose to post a photo taken on Instagram on Facebook, but highlighting someone’s Instagram activity on the much-larger social network was bad news for Instagram, which has a much more intimate vibe. So this may be a measure to improve user experience, plain and simple.
H/T The Next Web | Illustration by Jason Reed