When Instagram users opened the app last Tuesday, some were surprised by how visually similar the update was to Snapchat. The Instagram stories imitate Snapchat stories, where you can add a picture or video for all of your friends to view. The story will disappear 24 hours later. This sparked a debate that would take over the minds of social media junkies everywhere.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger created Intagram in 2010, then sold it to Facebook for $1 billion in 2014. On Instagram, users can upload pictures and videos that all their followers can view at any time. According to a recent report by Statista, there were 500,000 million users as of June 2016.
“I like it because I can see what my friends are doing, including the ones who don’t live in Atlanta,” junior Sam Epstein said. “For example, my friends Esra and Sammy, who live in New York, post pictures all the time, and I can keep updated with what they are doing.”
Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy developed Snapchat in July of 2011. By the end of the first summer, they had 127 users. According to Snapchat,  there are now over 100 million using the application every day.
Users can either send pictures to individual friends, or  post on their stories. Sent pictures or videos are only visible for up to 10 seconds when opened, after which they promptly disappear. However, if a user sends a picture or video to their story, it disappears in 24 hours. A story is accessible to anybody the user has added.
“This feature will bring more people to Instagram because it was getting boring,” sophomore Owen Neal said.
“Adding stories to Instagram makes me have to check a lot more notifications about people I do not necessarily care about, but on Snapchat I watch people’s stories I have added and want to watch,”sophomore Matios Teffere said.
However, there are still some distinct differences between the two. On Snapchat, when you take a picture or video, you can draw on the image with different pen colors. The same is true for Instagram, but they feature different types of writing utensils including highlighters, pens and glowing pens, all with customizable thicknesses and in an assortment of colors.