Admit it. When you’re scrolling through your Insta­gram feed, you occa­sion­al­ly feel a lit­tle antsy as you won­der if you’ve seen every new post that’s appeared since the last time you looked.

In that case, a new fea­ture being put through its paces by Insta­gram should serve to set­tle your nerves.

A lit­tle over a month after Insta­gram first start­ed test­ing a fea­ture that would tell users when they are “all caught up” with their feed, the pop­u­lar pho­to-shar­ing app has rolled out the fea­ture for good.

The big green noti­fi­ca­tion, first spot­ted by TechCrunch, actu­al­ly refers to all new images and videos post­ed to your feed in the pre­vi­ous 48 hours, so depend­ing on just how much you fear miss­ing out on stuff, you could con­tin­ue swip­ing to dig ever deep­er into your end­less stream of con­tent.

Since Insta­gram scrapped its chrono­log­i­cal feed in 2016, it has become more dif­fi­cult to know if you’ve seen all the new posts that have land­ed in your feed. A fea­ture like this, if Insta­gram rolls it out to the entire com­mu­ni­ty, would cer­tain­ly help to pro­vide clarity.

Part of its aim is to pre­vent so-called “zom­bie brows­ing,” free­ing you up to go and do some­thing more use­ful instead, though Insta­gram would ide­al­ly like you to stay with its app and maybe per­form search­es for new images or find some new users to follow.

Time wasting?

News of Instagram’s lat­est fea­ture comes at a time when tech com­pa­nies are talk­ing a lot about spend­ing more qual­i­ty time with online ser­vices. In Jan­u­ary, Face­book CEO Mark Zucker­berg said his com­pa­ny was chang­ing the site’s news feed to reduce the num­ber of posts by busi­ness­es, brands, and media in the hope of increas­ing inter­ac­tion between fam­i­ly and friends. He acknowl­edged that it could mean users spend less time on the social net­work­ing service.

Just last week, we learned that Insta­gram, which is owned by Face­book, may intro­duce an ana­lyt­ics tool telling you how long you’ve spent on the ser­vice in a giv­en time-frame. The appar­ent aim is to give users a way to help them man­age their time on the app, there­by giv­ing them enough con­trol to make bet­ter deci­sions about their usage.

And then there’s Google. At the company’s recent I/O devel­op­er meet-up, CEO Sun­dar Pichai spent time in his keynote talk­ing about respon­si­bil­i­ty in tech­nol­o­gy. The com­pa­ny is intro­duc­ing a new Dash­board fea­ture for Android users that will help them track how much time they spend on dif­fer­ent apps. Com­ing with Android P, users will also find an alerts fea­ture that lets you set timers that prompt you to take a break from an app. Google-owned YouTube has just rolled out such a fea­ture for both Android and iOS users.

SOURCE