Now you will know on Instagram when your friends are online

Now your friends will see how much time you are spending online scrolling through on Instagram.

Instagram announced this new chat feature in a blog post on Thursday which enables your followers to keep a tab on the time you are using Instagram. The concept is nothing new. Just like you can see when your Facebook friends are online (in case they haven’t switched off the online mode) you can also check when your contacts on Instagram are online so, you can land in their DM. Instagram will show a small green bubble next to the name of your Instagram friend.

Prior to that, we had to think twice before messaging someone on Instagram because we did not know whether they were active on Instagram or not but now you will know that your friend is online so, you can send them the message right away.

Instagram explained the need to roll out the feature by saying that it wanted to make it convenient for the users to chat within the app.

“This update enables you to have a real-time conversation with your friends also it gives you the control to hide your status altogether.” The company stated in a blog post.

This is definitely another reason for users to spend more time on Instagram. You can turn off the feature by going to the settings and tapping on the activity status and disabling it. The changes on Instagram do not seem big enough as they happen such as latest feature where you can sync your Instagram contacts to Facebook messenger app, but when we look back we realize the app has evolved a lot over time.

One particular thing about Facebook-owned apps is that they seem to start including every feature that any social media app has to offer and sometimes the reason people use a certain app owned by Facebook vanishes. For instance, I really enjoyed uploading some photos on Instagram but was never interested to chat through the forum. And the newly rolled out feature seems to have invaded my privacy and now I will be seeing a lot of DM’s every time I come online until I go to the settings and disable the online mode which means I am back to old Instagram.