Instagram enhances Notes feature by adding support for likes, mentions, and prompts

Today Instagram is rolling out a handful of enhancements to its Notes feature, including adding support for likes, mentions, and the ability to post prompts that others can respond to.

Building Notes into a more robust Instagram feature

While it started as a lightweight “status update” feature, Notes has since been upgraded to include support for adding video or music. Now with today’s updates, notes are becoming more like posts or stories with the ability to like others’ notes and @ mention others directly in your note.

Notes Prompts is another new upgrade, offering a fun, interactive way to spark more conversations with your friends over notes. Replies were already a supported feature of notes, but now you can more directly solicit those replies when creating your note. Responses to prompts will be displayed in a new UI displayed in the image above.

Notes first launched nearly 18 months ago, with the following intro by Instagram:

We’re beginning to roll out Notes, a new way to share your thoughts and see what your friends are up to. Notes are short posts of up to 60 characters using just text and emojis. During testing, we learned that people liked having a lightweight, easy way to share what’s on their mind and start conversations. From asking for recommendations to sharing what they’re up to, Notes give people a casual and spontaneous way to express themselves and connect with each other.

Following a steady stream of new features, Notes have become a more robust part of the Instagram experience that appears set for more growth in the future.

9to5Mac’s Take

With today’s updates, Notes has the potential to become more core to the Instagram experience than it has been previously. If the feature continues to expand and see wider adoption among Instagram users, it will be interesting to see how it might make its way more prominently into the Home feed and continue transforming what was once a photo-sharing service into something altogether different.