*By Alex Heath* Instagram is testing new features intended to curb addictive use of the photo-sharing app, its co-founder and chief technology officer Mike Krieger told Cheddar. “We want your time on Instagram to be good time,” Krieger said Tuesday in an interview with Cheddar at Instagram’s new office in New York. “Not time that you’re like, ‘Uh, I spent a little more time than I wanted to today.’” Facebook-owned Instagram is working on a feature called Usage Insights, which allows users to monitor how much time they spend with the app. It's part of a recent effort by technology companies to address the seeming addictive qualities of their products. [Apple](https://cheddar.com/videos/apple-focuses-on-ar-and-user-experience) and Google have recently incorporated similar features into their phones' operating systems to let users track the time they spend in certain apps. In addition to showing Instagram's 800 million monthly users how much time they spend in the app, the new Usage Insights feature has a “Do Not Disturb” mode that temporarily blocks access to the app if a user chooses to enable it. Though work on the feature began only recently, and the overuse of technology has been a rising issue for some time, Krieger said it is not too late for companies like Facebook to think more critically about how their services are used. “In the early stage you’re just understanding how things grow,” he said. “Your team is 10, 20 people. You’re just trying to keep the site up and not thinking too much about the overall picture or how you evolve things." He added it is a good time for Instagram to address this issue, "because it’s in popular consciousness so people are more willing to engage with these tools and think about what it means for them.” In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would focus on user "time well spent" as a key metric for judging the success of its platform. **Betting on New York** Since Krieger and his co-founder Kevin Systrom sold Instagram to Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion, Instagram has grown from fewer than 20 employees to nearly 1,000. Roughly 300 of them are located in New York, where Instagram opened a new office and intends to ramp up hiring this year. “There’s great talent from either the design world or the hedge fund world,” said Krieger, who oversees Instagram’s engineering department. “That comes together in a unique way for us in New York. For us, it’s all about continuing the expansion. By the end of the year, about a third of our engineering team will be out here.” For full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/instagram-co-founder-on-whats-next-for-stories-digital-health).
