Meta • Nuclear Bits

Instagram Tests Reels-first Experience in India

Meta has today announced that the company is testing a new “Reels-first” experience in the Instagram app in India.

To make it even easier to access these most-loved parts of Instagram, we’re testing a new Reels-first experience for a limited group of users. This experience is similar to our recent launch the Reels-first experience on iPad:

When you open Instagram, you’ll land directly in Reels. Stories remain at the top, making it easy to connect with friends.
DMs are now just one swipe away in the navigation bar for quick access to conversations from anywhere in the app.
There will also be a new “Following” tab, which gives you multiple ways to see the latest and greatest from the accounts you follow:
All: Recommended posts and Reels from accounts you follow.
Friends: Recommended posts and Reels from accounts you follow who also follow you back.
Latest: Chronological posts and Reels from accounts you follow, with the newest content first.

Very interesting, and I fully expected Instagram to dive head first into Reels considering how much they’ve blown up in the past couple of years. But more than the Reels feed taking centre-stage in the app, I’m very interested in experiencing the new “Following” tab that gives me a way to browse my “Friends” and “Latest” feeds separately.

I don’t have this new experience just yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

Welcome to Nuclear Bits 2.0

I launched Nuclear Bits back in July 2012. Up until that point, I had been “blogging” on and off at http://preshit.net since 2008 and it was time to retire that site. I was looking to start fresh with a new site, a new name and new place for all the interesting links and articles, and after a couple of weeks of work, Nuclear Bits was born. Over the last three years, I have published a little over 300 posts here, posting content across topics like Apple, apps, consumer technology, India, photography, videos, etc.

Today, I introduce Nuclear Bits 2.0. The site now sports a single column layout, with the beautiful Whitney typeface from Hoefler & Co replacing the old serif, which was Process Type Foundry’s Elena. The site should also be much more responsive now, being powered by CloudFlare‘s network.

This isn’t just a visual refresh though. I’ve also gotten rid of a lot of junk that seemed like a good idea back in 2012, but just doesn’t fit in with the trends of 2015. Overall, this took about 4 hours of work on a Sunday and I’m quite happy with the results.

I’m also a lot more motivated now and plan to get back to posting quality stuff here again.

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, click here to check the new site out.