According to The Verge, Facebook has started rolling out the new update to some Instagram users. Over the weekend, some members of the team opened up IG and were met with a prompt, which read: “There’s a New Way to Message on Instagram.” The new update includes a number of new features for IG DM slides—”new colourful look for your chats,” more emojis (YES), the ability to swipe-to-reply and, perhaps the biggest of updates, the ability to “chat with friends who use Facebook.”
In the new update, Instagram’s paper plane shaped messenger icon is replaced with Facebook’s classic speech bubble, and chat backgrounds change from blue to purple as you scroll. As of right now, the new update hasn’t merged Instagram and Facebook contacts yet, but we no doubt expect to see it go live and public by the end of the year.
“A small set of people were able to update to a new test experience for Instagram messaging,” the spokesperson said in an email to The Verge. “We hope they enjoy the experience and we are looking forward to testing it in other countries so we can keep learning from this.”
Last year, Facebook announced it planned to merge its three messenger apps—Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. In other news, we found the sneaky way you can view Instagram Stories without being seen, when’s the right time to slide into someone’s DMs, and asked the experts how to get Insta-famous.
In the meantime, we’ll be here trying to master Instagram’s TikTok clone, Reels. Don’t know what or how it works? Check out Girlfriend fave Rory Eliza’s lil video explaining it below.
