Instagram Now Let's You Know When your Friend's are Online

Instagram has just introduced a new feature aimed at making users spend more time on the app as well as improving interaction among users.

Instagram will now show a green dot at bottom left corner of a user's profile picture and this is to indicate when a user is online. This is very similar to how it works on Facebook messenger. The green dot will be appear in Instagram Direct as well as your friend list when you share a post from the feed.

The purpose of this new feature is to help improve interaction between Instagram users whenever they share something they like. The feature is also targeted at increasing real-time chat via direct as you will now be able to know when your friends are available to chat.

For privacy reasons though, you can choose to hide your online status as well as turn off the ability to see when other people are active. Note that you will only ever see the green dot for friends who follow you or people you've already talked to in Direct.