The New Go-to App: Instagram passes the 500,000 mark
Posted: Monday 29 November, 2010
George Guildford
With more and more people starting to talk about the photo-sharing sensation that is Instagram this month, it would seem that a new trend is rapidly taking shape in the world of social media. Naturally, as always, I jumped straight on board, downloaded the app to my smartphone and started to get to grips with how it all works.
Simply put, Instagram is pretty much an image-based version of Twitter, whereby users capture images with their smartphone, quickly and easily edit them through a built-in retro filtering feature, add comments and location information, and post the end result onto the Instagram feed. Much in the same way that you would follow people on Twitter, Instagram works along the same lines - when you follow people, their posts/photos are then added to your feed and the more people you follow, the bigger your feed will get - when people follow you, any images you upload will automatically appear in their feeds and vice-versa.
After a week of Instagramming, the one thing in particular that I have noticed is that the app integrates perfectly with other social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr), enabling users to share their images across multiple channels, all from the comfort of just one app. In fact, it’s this seamless nature of the app and the way it simplifies the social media integration elements that have already made it one of my favourite go-to apps. Much like Twitter, its appeal really does lie in its simplicity and usability, as well as the fact that it quickly becomes a hugely interactive and engaging app to use.
Despite a number of photo-based apps already out there, Instagram seems to have tapped-in to something that the others haven’t quite mastered yet, passing the 500,000 users mark after just a matter of weeks and pretty much becoming a social media network of its own. Additionally, users also now have the perfect photo app to link in with their location-based apps like Foursquare - which when used alongside Instagram, automatically enables users to attach location information to any images posted to their Instagram feed. My guess would be, that as the geo-tagging and photo-sharing trends continue to grow, the relevance and popularity of Instagram will surely only increase further and further.
