Instagram’s latest tweak to its already burgeoning offering sees the introduction of Boomerang, letting you take a burst of photos to make a micro, recurring video.
Instagram’s Boomerang toy combines photos into one-second videos that look, on first viewing, quite good actually.
You can take Boomerangs (that will take some getting used to) in either portrait or landscape, which is a nice touch, and they can be shared outside of the Instagram platform.
It resembles, to varying degrees, gifs, Twitter-owned Vines and even Apple’s new Live Photos.
“Capture a friend jumping off a diving board, defying physics as she flies back and forth through the air,” understates the company in a blog post.
“Get that exact moment your friend blows out his birthday candles, then watch them come back to life again and again.”
Earlier this year, the company brought out Layout, another way to style your pics, and more recently Hyperlapse was released, which the company notes as an inspiration for this new Boomerang-filled world. By the way, Boomerang is a fantastic name. You can get it on iOS here and Android here.
The five-year-old company has been on an upward trajectory from the get-go, founded back in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger just as social media was exploding and heading in a new direction.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company bought Instagram for $1bn four years ago, turning it from a clever product into a cultural behemoth, with its relatively paltry user base of 30m back in 2011 an example of its rocketing scale, with 400m monthly users noted as its most recent achievement.
Main image via Shutterstock
