Once again, Instagram missed the ball on a 'top nine' year retrospective feature
- Tech Backbone
It's New Year's Eve, which means that your Instagram stream is potentially packed with people sharing "top nine" grids of their most liked pictures from this year, whether it's anything like mine. Yet, bafflingly, everybody will turn to sketchy-looking third-party applications and forums for another year to make them. Since Instagram has struggled to have an official, automatic means of curating the photos inside the app once again.
I'm left totally baffled by this as someone who personally loves using the top nine format to look back on a year of fun baked images. People tend to love to bring the collages together to look back on their previous year of content. Instagram has also offered grid tools for uploading images in various formats to your storey. And she obviously has access to the details.
Just look at the success of the summary feature of Spotify's Wrapped year, which has dominated December with users showing off their most streamed tracks, styles, and numbers. Instagram needs to be mindful of the trend. Instagram stories are one of the most common sites for music users to show their taste.
Plus, Facebook, the organisation that invented automatic year-in-review footage, owns Instagram. Facebook utilises the strength of algorithms to compile annual videos and 'friendiversary' highlights immediately (although rarely depressing). It seems like a no-brainer to make users automatically build and share the top nine entries. But without even the barest nod to the definition, 2020 is rolling by.
Users are left with third-party providers instead, hundreds of which each year skyrocket up the app store lists. These platforms also require customers to fork over personal information such as their email addresses or rely on hideous watermarks or logos to plaster photos.
In most third-party options, such as the inability to create top nine grids for private accounts, it's easy to see how Instagram could streamline this method and even solve some of the pain points.
And then, with Instagram dropping the ball on this seemingly simple feature, it seems that 2020 will end. I suppose 2021 still exists.
