Instagram to add Vine-like video sharing feature: report

Is video sharing coming to Facebook's Instagram? 

On Thursday, Facebook will hold a press event at its Menlo Park headquarters. What's on the table? Well, Facebook isn't saying, and the text on the invite isn't much help: "A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product." 

But over at TechCrunch, Ingrid Lunden has a guess: Facebook is about to unveil a video feature for Instagram, which it acquired in 2012 for close to a billion dollars. This makes a certain kind of sense. Vine, a video sharing tool for Twitter, has proved quite popular, to the tune of 13 million users since launch. 

Facebook is unlikely to let Twitter go unchallenged in that space. Furthermore, as Ms. Lunden points out, talk of an Instagram "five to 10 second" video feature have been percolating for weeks, most recently on the website of journalist Matthew Keys. 

"While the video feature is being tested internally, it is unclear if it will launch to Instagram’s 100 million monthly active users, who collectively upload around 40 million photos per day," Keys wrote. "It’s also unclear if the app will have Instagram’s hallmark filters."

Of course, Facebook hasn't commented one way or another on the rumors, and the social network could be unveiling just about anything, from a fancy new piece of hardware to RSS feeds. The latter guess comes from developer Tom Waddington, who speculates that Facebook could be trying to fill the vacuum left in the wake of the closure of Google Reader. 

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