At first glance, I thought, here's another photo social network that does nothing that Flickr can't do, except excite the Technorati because it was created by someone who worked at Twitter and Google. After playing with Instagram for a while, though, I could start to see the addiction for it that's clearly affecting a lot of its users (the majority of whom appear to be teenaged girls, by the way). The Flickr iPhone app, it's true, lacks Instagram's photo-blinging effects, and though you can get a better selection of these from other iPhone apps like iBooth or Camera+, Instagram brings them to social photo sharing, making applying them a snap.
Tumblr offers a similar social photo experience, and I can see why Instagram is similarly alluring. In both, you see a picture you like, you can view the list of everyone else who liked it, view their photos, and those of anyone on those users' contact lists. Tumblr does come with a far larger audience, though, and the Tumblr app exceeds Instagram's capabilities by not only letting you upload photos, but video, audio, text, and links, in a better-designed interface. The Instagram team pumps out new versions regularly, so we may see it catch up to Tumblr.
Other services like Tumbler and CloudTalk do offer more posting options, but Instagram's restriction to just photos could be in its favor. Instagram has major advantages over Path and Color, too, apps that might seem to compete with it. But the former only lets you see and share images from contacts, and the latter…well, Color was popular the week it came out, but good luck finding anyone running it now.
We can't ignore the elephant in the room: Facebook is rumored to be launching a publicphoto sharing app, which could effectively put the kibosh on any small players, no matter how much cachet they have with tech insiders. Even now, the Facebook iPhone app does a decent job with photos, but that's just for seeing your Friends' photos; there's no discovery of other people out in the great world sharing images.
And we mustn't forget the other social network that matters, either. Twitter just announced it would be adding its own photo feature hosted by Photobucket.
So the world of mobile photo sharing is due for a shake out. There are just too many players at the moment. While Instagram is having a shining moment, it's unlikely to unseat major players like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Flickr. But for now, in its moment in the sun, Instagram is certainly worth your rooting around in its contents. If you want larger audiences for your photos without the effect gimmickry, stick with Flickr and Tumblr's iPhone apps, or check out the new arrivals from Twitter and Facebook.
More than a few pundits noted the similarity of Apple's announced iCloud feature they're calling Photo Stream to an app that's been around over a half a year and is gaining in popularity—Instagram. But Instagram differs in important ways from its iCloud imitator (we think): It lets you bling your iPhone photos and flaunt them to a public social network. The Flickr (Free, 4 stars) and Tumblr (Free, 3 stars) iPhone apps also let you take and upload photos to a stream that can be public, others can subscribe to your feed, and can comment on and like your pictures. CloudTalk (Free, 3.5 stars) goes beyond these adding voice messages. But Instagram's focus on photos can be seen as a plus, and the app really can get addictive, once you start hopping around among users' uploads.
Signup and Setup
To do anything but browse popular photos, you'll need to create an Instagram account. I'm not sure why the app's creators didn't just let you sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account, as more and more services are doing. To get going, you need to enter an email address, user name, and optionally a phone number and photo. You're then encouraged to find friends on the service in your contact list, Facebook, and Twitter. You can also just search for those you know.
To do anything but browse popular photos, you'll need to create an Instagram account. I'm not sure why the app's creators didn't just let you sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account, as more and more services are doing. To get going, you need to enter an email address, user name, and optionally a phone number and photo. You're then encouraged to find friends on the service in your contact list, Facebook, and Twitter. You can also just search for those you know.
I found that quite a few of the fad-following technorati I follow on Twitter had accounts already. In a twitter-like setup (Instagram's founder and CEO came from Twitter) you click a button to "follow" other users. After finding and choosing folks to follow, the app suggested celebrities and the like for me to add—Rosie O'Donnell, Foo Fighters, and NPR were presented for my consideration. Each of these showed four rotating image thumbnails, in a pleasant UI touch.
The app then popped up a notification telling me it wanted to send me Push Notifications. That sounds unnecessarily intrusive for a nonessential service. Do I really want a notification to stop whatever I'm doing because someone uploaded another picture of his brat? Luckily, that's not the case with these notifications: They're just for when someone "Likes" or comments on one of your pictures. But still, many may prefer not to add another source of interruptions.
Interface
Once you snap a photo or choose one from your iPhone's camera roll, a scrollable gallery of effects appears along the bottom of the screen—things like lomo, sepia, along with some cleverly named options—nothing I'd ever apply to a photo I wanted to look its best. But there are a couple useful and interesting options, you can move and scale your photo so it fits well in the mandatory square used by Instagram, and a tilt-shift effect is interesting, letting you change a photo's perspective. This actually does more toward creating a bokeheffect, blurring part of your photo.
Once you snap a photo or choose one from your iPhone's camera roll, a scrollable gallery of effects appears along the bottom of the screen—things like lomo, sepia, along with some cleverly named options—nothing I'd ever apply to a photo I wanted to look its best. But there are a couple useful and interesting options, you can move and scale your photo so it fits well in the mandatory square used by Instagram, and a tilt-shift effect is interesting, letting you change a photo's perspective. This actually does more toward creating a bokeheffect, blurring part of your photo.
After you've tweaked the image to your taste, you decide how and where to share. You get a choice of enabling the iPhone's geotag, sharing to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, or Posterous. When your social contact clicks the entry, an Instagram Web page displays the photo and touts the iPhone app, but thankfully viewing doesn't require them to sign up for an account. On either these or the Instagram feed, you can't title or caption a photo as you can in Flickr, but you and anyone who sees it can write a comment or "heart" it. At the top, a time elapsed indicator says when the photo was uploaded, whether 3 seconds ago or 3 hours ago.
In addition to seeing the feed of uploaded photos from your contacts, you can view popular images, or just news about who uploaded or commented. I only wish you could view full size photos instead of being restricted to the partial screen squares, and that you could scroll through a particular user's stream, rather than having to click repeatedly on thumbnails. A twitter-like profile page shows how many users are following you and vice versa. In all, the interface isn't what I'd call slick: no one's going to confuse it for an Apple-created app. But it's clear enough, and apparently is going for a folksy, low-res look.
You can set your photo stream to private, so that only users you approve can see it, but there's no private messaging, as in Kik and CloudTalk. Like Tumblr, though, Instagram isn't about messaging, but rather a stream of socially connected posts. Still, a private messaging option wouldn't hurt. Path, another mobile photo-sharing up-and-comer, has the opposite problem: You can't view photos of anyone you haven't connected with.
Sources: pcmag.com
