Instagram is getting a little bit more like its parent company, Facebook, with a new feature that lets you tag your friends in photos.
"Photos of You" will appear by May 16 as a new tab on every Instagram user's profile. The section will show all photos you're tagged in on the photo-sharing service, and you'll get notifications when new tags are added. Hey, just like Facebook!
But, although Facebook owns the app, you won't be able to tag Facebook friends in photos unless they're also your friends on Instagram.
If you hate a photo you're tagged in, you can change your settings so you have to approve a tagged photo before it shows up in your "Photos of You" section.
You can already add hashtags to photos to make them more searchable, but being able to tag specific users adds another, more personalized layer to the graph.
Facebook's $1 billion bet
News of the Facebook-esque feature arrives just days after Facebook reported its first-quarter earnings, which included a few notes about Instagram. (If you recall, Facebook acquired the photo app for $1 billion last year.)
"I'm really proud of how Instagram is doing," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company's Wednesday earnings call. "When we agreed to acquire them, Instagram had 22 million monthly active users. Now more than 100 million people are using Instagram each month. Instagram is growing faster than the Facebook community did when it was this size."
Instagram doesn't yet make any money from advertising, but the blog announcing "Photos of You" noted that you can tag brands in your photos now, too. It's unclear whether user-generated photos of products or businesses will become part of Instagram's money-making strategy going forward, but the possibilities are clearly there.
