If you were engaged in something worthwhile on Thursday rather than paying attention to technology blogs, you might have missed the fact that photo-sharing app Instagram — now a subsidiary of social behemoth Facebook Inc. (s fb) — launched a new feature the company calls Instagram Direct, as Om predicted it would several weeks ago. The new feature essentially turns Instagram into a messaging app, allowing users to send the equivalent of direct messages to friends along with a picture or video.

This feature obviously pits Instagram against a horde of other messaging apps and micro-social networks, including Twitter (s twtr) — which just launched a new photo-enhanced direct-messaging feature of its own — as well as Snapchat, Kik, WhatsApp, and Facebook’s own branded messenger service. It’s getting so smartphone users could probably fill up an entire screen with just apps that involve photo-sharing and/or messaging of some kind.