Instagram’s cool questioned as it starts emailing users with ‘Highlights’

Instagram has started sending out ‘Highlights’ emails to some users. The emails, er, ‘highlight’ things they may have missed from accounts that they follow.

As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine, who spotted the development, noted, it could help draw lapsed users back to the app.

“Some people will surely bristle at the idea of receiving more email, especially one’s they didn’t explicitly sign up for. However, Highlights could solve an issue common amongst maturing social networks that show a live, reverse chronological feed of posts. It impacts networks like Instagram and Twitter, but not relevancy-sorted streams like Facebook’s.”

So it’s a sign of Instagram’s increasingly mainstream status, or as the Daily Dot’s Selena Larson put it:

Instagram, you're supposed to be cool

— Selena Larson (@selenalarson) May 24, 2015

While Vox’s Margarita Noriega concurred:

The fact is, there are about a gazillion cooler things Instagram could have launched than an RSS-feed email newsletter, and they know that.

— Margarita Noriega (@margarita) May 24, 2015

But hey, most of lose a little of our cool as we grow older and money becomes more important than our image.

Image credit: tulpahn / Shutterstock.com