Here’s a little quirky addition Instagram has for everyone – the platform is currently testing a new option to help users celebrate their birthday, with a special Birthday photo effect that would be visible on your profile for the day. Everybody deserves to enjoy their special day, one way or another, right? Though applicable mostly annually, this could end up being a handy promotional tool.

Happy Birthday!

Based on screenshots shared and sent in by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, this new process would enable users to add a birthday effect to their profile image, which would let others know that they’re celebrating, providing a similar function to how we’ve all outsourced our birthday reminders to Facebook.

That might be the point. As Facebook continues to decline in popularity, especially with young users, Meta might be looking to maintain that functionality across another app, while also adding another reason for more engagement and interaction. Besides, Instagram already (likely) has your birthday information, since it made all users enter their birthdate back in 2021, as part of a push to stop underage users from accessing the app.

It thus makes sense to add it in, which could potentially expand the app’s utility, while simultaneously providing another way for Instagram to showcase its evolving visual effects tools. Besides, people always appreciate a good birthday celebration tool, and generally any tool that helps make special moments more memorable. This was recently made evident, amid backlash to Twitter seemingly removing its birthday balloons feature. As it turns out, Twitter didn’t actually remove it, but instead left it inactive for some time due to a back-end error.

The Wrap 

Again, it’s nothing major – it’s not an update that’ll propel Instagram ahead of the game by any means, but it’s an update nonetheless. While serving a very limited need of helping you possibly remind people that your special day is coming up, it does still help with interaction, providing just a tiny bit more spark of joy in the app. As we mentioned earlier, it can be used to build a lot of hype leading up to a birthday, which might come in handy for big celebrations such as one’s 7th, 16th, 18th, and 21st birthday.

Sources

http://bit.ly/3zqk2Lk