Facebook today kicked off its F8 developer conference by announcing new features for Instagram.
First up, Instagram is getting video chat (shown above). This feature will support one-on-one chat as well as group chatting, and you can minimize your video chat to keep it going while you do other things in the Instagram app. This feature is in testing now and will roll out globally soon.
Also coming to Instagram is a new Explore feature. With it, content will be organized into topic channels so you can browse your specific interests and dive deeper into a specific one if you'd like to. The new Explore will roll out over the coming weeks.
Instagram is making it easy to share from other apps to Instagram Stories, too. This feature will support Spotify and GoPro initially and will include more apps in the future. With this feature, you can tap the share button in the Spotify or GoPro apps and pull the content directly into your Instagram camera. You can then edit the image and share it to Stories or send it via Direct.
Finally, Instagram will now allow third-parties to design interactive camera experiences for their followers. These effects will be available in your Stories when an account you follow adds one. You can try these effects by tapping "Try it on" to get the toiol added to your tray. Instagram says that effects are coming soon from Ariana Grande, Baby Ariel, Liza Koshy, Vogue, and Buzzfeed.