Facebook-owned Instagram has copied quite a few features from Snapchat in the past. One of the most famous being Stories. Well now, the company seems to have copied a feature from Pinterest.
Instagram is spotted working on a new feature that lets you make your collections public, similar to what Pinterest does. Instagram launched its private collections feature a couple of years ago. The way it works is you save a post by tapping on the bookmark icon below it, and then organize it for ease of viewing by creating a collection that’s private to you.
You can create different collections for different kinds of posts that are related to travel, fitness, food, or almost anything under the Sun that’s posted on Instagram. However, these collections are private to you and others can’t see them.
But, Instagram might soon let you make your collections public, making them visible to others.
Reverse engineering specialist Jane Manchun Wong has found a new feature on Instagram’s Android app (refer snapshot above) that would let you make your collections public. The snapshot reveals that you would also be able to add other people to your public collections as contributors.
We find the collections feature very useful, however, we are not exactly sure how useful the public collections feature would turn out to be. It will probably help people gain more followers based on how good the collections they have. Perhaps letting users add hashtags to their public collection and then showcasing the top collections in the Explore tab would be cool.
Instagram in a statement to TechCrunch said that they are “not testing this” feature, so we cannot say for sure if and when this feature will be rolled out to the public.
What are your thoughts about public collections?
