Instagram is bringing up a new feature or more like a new sort of notification system through emails called highlights. Instagram has already initiated sending out “highlights” emails to some of its users this month. Like Twitter’s similar “best of” emails, the messages serve up a sort of recap of what’s been going on in your social network. More importantly for Instagram, the emails serve as a way to keep the photo sharing service at the front of users’ minds. An email here or there can help occasional users interact with the service without committing to opening the app every day or week. It also, Instagram hopes, to remind users just how much fun they’re missing out on by not using the app frequently.

This could help you remember the service and catch photos that would otherwise slip under the radar. Yes, the highlights are ultimately meant to get you viewing more ads, but they may be useful if you’d rather not spend every day wading through an image stream. Now Instagram is maturing to the phase where it’s trying to wake up lapsing members. It has “300 million monthly users”, but that’s an imprecise statistic encompassing some who hardly check it. To accomplish its mission of sharing moments and fuel its ad-based business model, it needs us to voraciously browse its feed.