Photo-sharing social network Instagram has unveiled Bolt - an app that lets users capture and send photos and videos to friends with one tap.
Positioned by the Facebook-owned network as "the fastest way to share an image or a video", Bolt is the first standalone app from the Instagram team and launches today in three countries exclusively - SA, New Zealand and Singapore.
Built to cater to the modern-day mobile communication trend, Bolt has been compared to Stanford University-born Snapchat, which lets users share multimedia content with a selected list of recipients, and choose how long the content can be viewed by them before "disappearing".
Facebook says mobile messaging is how people communicate today, "but sharing an image still takes too many steps and too much time". The social network giant says Bolt was built to be fast and simple, "for communicating in that moment with people you're close to, as quickly as possible".
This is how Bolt works:
1. The user signs up with their phone number.
2. The user adds friends to a "favourites" list (up to 20 contacts).
3. With a single tap, the user then shoots and sends a photo or video.
4. Captions can be added and users can also reply directly to messages received with a photo or text.
5. Once the Bolt message is swiped away, it's "gone" - and cannot be accessed by users again.
According to World Wide Worx, Instagram has "exploded" in SA. The research company's 2014 social media landscape study reveals the photo sharing and special effects app went from having less than 100 000 users in the last quarter of 2012, to 680 000 in August 2013.
That number is expected to be a lot higher now, a year down the line. Mike Wronski, MD of social network analytics company Fuseware, said at the end of last year that the number of local Instagram users would grow "even more dramatically" going forward. "Instagram [will become] a popular app on Android phones, while Android itself is expected to grow significantly in SA in the coming year."
The Bolt app is available for free download from the Apple App Store (iOS versions 7 and up) and Google Play Store (Android OS 4 and up) as of today.
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