Instagram and Creative Blindness

Over the last month it's been exciting to watch Instagram grow within Made By Many. Tim's post Quora is from Mars, Instagram is from Venus talks about the "simple pre-verbal delight of sharing something beautiful by showing it to other people" and that's the heart of the attraction. Instagram is incredibly casual, it doesn't demand you share your location, and the community is clearly encouraged to "like" other photos, rather than submitting comments, or rating pictures.

My first reaction to realising how much and how often I checked the Instagram feed was to start thinking about an API. Perhaps that's a natural reaction, wanting to build things on top of a successful, social application, but I'm becoming more convinced that it's also the wrong one.

There is no official Instagram API, although there do seem to be plans to create one. Again, though, waiting for an official API before building something is the wrong approach. It's the technical solution to a creative problem.

Perhaps the right approach is to use the Instagram application as an API itself. Rather than waiting, then building out parts of the service which don't exist (the desktop version of Instagram is fairly sparse, for example), why not bend the streams to your own ends?

There's certainly fun to be had building out from the starting point of Instagram using an API, but it feels more inventive, more creative, to inject yourself into the stream, to tell a story that appears in snapshots between the other photos. To playfully subvert the attention stream from within.

The obvious idea is to use Instagram for blogging, which I've done with this post, but there are many more ways of using the system without building on top of the system. There's a creative blindness that can be paralysing if we're conditioned by the successes of Twitter and Facebook to only use the official channels when we want to take a community in our own direction. Sometimes the most creative approach is the direct one, which is a lesson I need to learn.