San Francisco, March 29 : Facebook-owned photo-messaging app Instagram appears to be re-branding to include the parent company’s name as part of its own.
“Instagram will have a new branding called ‘Instagram from Facebook’,” reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong tweeted along with a screenshot of the re-branded name.
To establish full control over the different divisions of his company, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been planning to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook into a unified platform.
The unified platform, would have a collective user-base of over 2.6 billion people and Zuckerberg aims to help them cross-communicate across the apps, the media had reported.
Earlier in March, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger spoke at the 2019 South By South West (SXSW) Conference and Festivals at Austin, Texas, since leaving Facebook last September, sore about losing independence within the Zuckerberg-led company.
“Instagram co-founder @kevin mentioned during SXSW 2019 that Instagram’s autonomy has been being reduced. And this new branding is showing it,” Wong added.
Neither Facebook nor Instagram has released an official statement on the subject as yet.
Meanwhile, Facebook-owned photo-messaging app Instagram is testing a seek-bar for shorter videos to let users drag the cursor to watch specific parts of the videos.
The functionality is already offered for IGTV videos on the platform. But now it is being tested for the 60-second videos users upload on their accounts to make locating desired parts of the videos easier for followers.
The test feature was discovered by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong who tweeted a clip of an Instagram video with the seek-bar on top of the video on Thursday.
Instagram has not disclosed any details about the official rollout of the feature as yet.
Ever since its launch, the photo-messaging app has kept a tight leash on content controls and options on its platform.
It does not allow any links on the captions and only lets users view one post at a time as opposed to swiping through each post from a profile.
However, it seems as the platform is expanding, it is incorporating additional functionalities to cater to user demands, Social Media Today reported.
Recently, the platform launched the beta version of its in-app shopping feature called “Checkout with Instagram” starting with the US to allow users to buy products tagged in images or videos without having to leave the platform.
