The regular progression of technology follows certain trends that are easy enough to trail and predict once they’ve been established. Occasionally, however, someone goes against the current for various reasons, which is what Instagram did when it upgraded its desktop platform.

In addition to providing simple search functions, Instagram now has landing pages for geotags and hashtags. The desktop version now also allows users to see the top and most recent posts based on locations and hashtags.

Moving to an “Older” Channel

All of these functions first became available on the mobile app as early as June. But, as web embeds became a bigger part of traffic generation, the need for a better desktop experience became apparent. Instagram representatives reported that they were able to get 5.3 billion impressions from embeds, which is a good argument to start taking advantage of desktop.

This increase in focus on desktop capability is a strange move considering other primarily mobile apps such as Snapchat have little to no interest in expanding their capabilities on the platform. It may not seem like much from the user’s perspective, but integrating a single service to work simultaneously on different platforms is a challenge.

Identical Channels

In fact, Facebook took longer than most people expected to improve the performance of chat in their Messenger mobile app in comparison to its desktop counterpart. Both Facebook and Instagram have succeeded in merging the two platforms seamlessly so that it doesn’t matter from which device a user accesses their services.

The only time Facebook found that their efforts were successful was when users stopped thinking about which version of the product they’re using, as they were virtually identical. This allowed the social media giant to add another presence to its already growing library of access channels.

Taking advantage of available channels regardless of current relevance in the technology trend is always a good idea, as it adds another way through which users can access the site.

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