Instagram’s direct message function is getting a big infusion of features today, including scheduled direct messages that you can prewrite and set to send on a later date, up to 29 days in advance. You can also now pin up to three messages to the top of the chat.
Meta says the changes are intended to help with messaging people who live in different time zones or to keep important messages (read: memes) visible in busy group chats where things are easily missed.
A few more incoming DM-specific features include the ability to invite friends to a group chat with a QR code, plus message translations with support for 99 languages. You can translate any individual message and see the result inline as if your friend originally sent it.
Another fun addition is sharing music natively within the app, which would allow you and your friends to listen to the same song simultaneously, or share them asynchronously without using links or otherwise navigating away from Instagram.
You can access the music search feature in the same view where stickers and animated GIFs live.
Music sharing will extend to broadcast channels (which are sort of like public direct message inboxes intended for creators with mostly one-way messaging to their followers), though it’s unclear whether that’s true of the other features, which are all rolling out globally today.
