Instagram DMs add live location sharing and nicknames

Instagram adds the ability to share your live location with friends in your DMs for up to an hour at a time so you can find each other when you arrive at concerts, outings, and other gatherings. The feature works within Instagram direct messages, which also get a few other new features, including sticker packs and nicknames.

Instagram says you can share your location privately with others via DMs, either one-to-one or within group chats, and the feature is automatically turned off. It’s similar to the location-sharing features in Snapchat’s SnapMap, which includes the ability to share photos with friends on a map. Currently, these features are only available in “select countries” (Instagram doesn’t say where.)

You can now give yourself and your friends nicknames in your DMs, including group chats. You can lock friends out of that ability if you don’t like what they’ve nicknamed you, and the feature only lives in certain conversations — so outsiders can’t see each other’s given nicknames.

DMs have 17 new sticker packs with over 300 new stickers, too, that you can enter into chats with your friends. You can even mark stickers that friends send you as favorites in chats, reuse them, and create your own with the cutting feature or generate them with AI.

The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said last week that people use messages more than the create button, so the company is now testing a new placement of the chat icon at the bottom and center of the application.