Even while rumours about Instagram coming up with a private messaging service have been circulating for a bit now, it has received some more credibility with a report today. It has now emerged that certain users have been given personal “@instagram.com” email addresses.
After GigaOm reported last week about the Snapchat-like private messaging service Instagram is mulling over, TechCrunch has now revealed the existence of email addresses ending in “instagram.com” now. A source that works in marketing for an e-commerce company showed the publication a list of such email addresses. These IDs appeared as part of a request made to a company that compiles data from social networking websites.
Private messaging coming soon?
The results received by this source consisted of Twitter handles, Facebook email addresses and then Instagram email addresses. “We requested verified email addresses for the followers of a certain fan club on Twitter and received back these results,” the source wrote. “We use [the data provider] as a tool for gathering information, and suddenly A LOT of the email fields were being filled in with Instagram email addresses.”
The move to offer private messaging service, though a little surprising at this point of time, was not completely unexpected. The photo-sharing application was purchased by Facebook last year for around a $1 million and the service has only just started taking baby-steps towards monetising its apps. However, both Facebook and Instagram are facing competition from the likes of Snapchat, that is now seeing about 40 million snaps being sent everyday. This number overtakes the number of pictures uploaded on Facebook daily too.
One of Snapchat’s USP is that it allows private messaging of self-destructing snaps. So, when Instagram announced that it is going to allow private messaging, the tech world immediately drew parallels to Snapchat’s services. Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, too has a similar email service. You can safely give out your @facebook.com email address to anyone and be able to receive emails and attachments on it. If @instagram.com email IDs are truly on their way, it could well be an extension of this existing service.
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