I’ve been trying to play with Instagram—rough notes and a few thoughts after drinks with a friend. Things that are interesting about Instagram: It’s almost exclusively mobile You can only look at one photo at a time—it’s almost anti-scanning which is a very interesting choice for something experienced mainly on a phone. Does this scale up to following hundreds of people? (compare to the Twitter client which is made for scanning). They obviously hope so and their hooks for following (Facebook, twitter, contacts) are excellent. Per above, this works when the userbase is the Techcrunch 50k or when you only want to see a daily photo from a handful of people you care about The workaround for poor quality cameras: filters The thing I really can’t get over: The photo filters are too homogeneous. It’s true that the cameras on phones only perform well in certain conditions and that filters are probably the most easily accessible crutch. But there’s something really odd about having a small selection of filters. On other services, users can aspirationally represent themselves in many ways—curation of taste and fact, images.To requote Chuck Close “Now, having said that, I think while photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It’s the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing reasonably good stuff and to find a personal voice, your own vision, and to make something that is truly, memorably yours and not someone else’s.” Instagram really brings out the sameness in the images, which is strange because you’re looking at moments captured by many different people—you would hope that a service based around photos would be more individual than templated bits of text. It will be interesting to see if this ever becomes a problem for Instagram (or maybe phone cameras get better too quickly)—but maybe people will continue to be smitten with the 70s aesthetic. It’s also possible that it takes a while to understand the signal. When I first started using Twitter, it took a while for me to be able to piece together themes, narratives, and feel for the various people that I followed—at first it was a lot of noise. See also - Choire Sicha: Your Beautiful Pictures Are Stupid: Against Trendy Digital Photography

I’ve been trying to play with Instagram—rough notes and a few thoughts after drinks with a friend.

Things that are interesting about Instagram:

  1. It’s almost exclusively mobile
  2. You can only look at one photo at a time—it’s almost anti-scanning which is a very interesting choice for something experienced mainly on a phone. Does this scale up to following hundreds of people? (compare to the Twitter client which is made for scanning). They obviously hope so and their hooks for following (Facebook, twitter, contacts) are excellent.
  3. Per above, this works when the userbase is the Techcrunch 50k or when you only want to see a daily photo from a handful of people you care about
  4. The workaround for poor quality cameras: filters

The thing I really can’t get over:

  1. The photo filters are too homogeneous. It’s true that the cameras on phones only perform well in certain conditions and that filters are probably the most easily accessible crutch. But there’s something really odd about having a small selection of filters. On other services, users can aspirationally represent themselves in many ways—curation of taste and fact, images.

To requote Chuck Close

“Now, having said that, I think while photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It’s the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing reasonably good stuff and to find a personal voice, your own vision, and to make something that is truly, memorably yours and not someone else’s.”

Instagram really brings out the sameness in the images, which is strange because you’re looking at moments captured by many different people—you would hope that a service based around photos would be more individual than templated bits of text. It will be interesting to see if this ever becomes a problem for Instagram (or maybe phone cameras get better too quickly)—but maybe people will continue to be smitten with the 70s aesthetic.

It’s also possible that it takes a while to understand the signal. When I first started using Twitter, it took a while for me to be able to piece together themes, narratives, and feel for the various people that I followed—at first it was a lot of noise.

See also - Choire Sicha: Your Beautiful Pictures Are Stupid: Against Trendy Digital Photography

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