Social-Media
Instagram again dropped the ball on the 'top nine' year of the analysis function.
It's New Year's Eve, which means that your Instagram feed—if it's something like mine—is possibly loaded with people sharing "top nine" grids with their best pictures this year. Yet, bafflingly, for another year, everybody will turn to sketchy-looking third-party applications and pages to make them. Because again, Instagram has struggled to have an official, automatic way to process photos inside the app.
As someone who personally loves using the top nine style to look back on a year of baked good pictures, I'm left completely baffled by this. People tend to enjoy bringing the collages together to look back on their past year of posts. Instagram also provided grid software to post images to your story in a range of formats. And it obviously has access to the details.
Just look at the success of Spotify's Wrapped Year review tool, which came to overtake December with users showing off their most streamed tracks, genres, and numbers.
Instagram needs to be mindful of the trend—Instagram stories are one of the most common ways for people to show off their musical taste.
Plus, Instagram is operated by Facebook, a corporation that has invented automated year-on-year video ratings. Facebook uses the strength of algorithms to assemble instant (albeit sometimes depressive) annual videos and "friendiversary" highlights. Letting users build and upload the top nine posts instantly seems like a no-brainer. Yet 2020 is moving ahead without even the barest reference to the thought.
Instead, customers are left with third-party utilities, hundreds of which are submitted to app store charts every year. These sites also require customers to fork over personal information such as their email addresses or insist on plastering photos with hideous watermarks or logos.
It's easy to see how Instagram will streamline this method and even resolve some of the pain points in most third-party options, such as the failure to produce the top nine grids for private accounts.
And yet, it seems that 2020 is going to end with Instagram dropping the ball on this seemingly obvious feature. I suppose there’s always 2021.
