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So this isn't an actual Smiths lyric, but this bastardised version has been rattling around in my head while thinking about the whole Instagram + Facebook thing over the last week. In trying to figure out how I feel about it I keep returning to a couple of ideas.
Instagram, I loved you.
You were my first real relationship after Twitter, and right now I feel angry and bitter about you turning your back on all the good stuff we had going. I feel shut out by you, and I can't bear the thought of you and Facebook, you know... 'together'...
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I don't know how I can keep all this hurting inside of me...
It's no secret that we're pretty huge fans of Instagram, so I won't spend too much time waxing lyrical about its potential (Tim is probably your man for that) instead, I'd like open up something that we've been working on to allow us to rapidly develop real-time Instagram-fed web apps.
Since the API was announced in February, only a few (albeit fantastic) real-time Instagram apps have surfaced. Which is pretty strange; this innovation could, and should, finally push us away from the photo-bank model, and into the stream.
Instagram has changed the way I look at photography, from taking single images of beautiful found ephemera to sharing sequences of images as an event or moment unfolds. These moments become a journey through your life, one that is both shared and intimate (as @malbonster mentions in his recent blog post; Making sense of life through photography).
This made me think about the way that photography has evolved and integrated into our lives. It also made me wonder how literal photographic journeys could evolve. How could the day of a social group be documented though more than just a camera lens? To capture more than just one media (or sense)?
This led to an experiment: could the 'development' of a photographic journey be through the addition of sound bites? What would the experience become, would sound enhance or disrupt the imagery?
Yesterday, I spoke at the She Says SCAMP conference 2011. The theme was 'mashup', so I decided to speak about the mashup of my online and offline worlds, or lessons that I've learnt as I work in the digital industry that I also consider offline.
A quick search for 'Apple should buy Instagram' on Google shows that the general thinking of the inter-brain is Apple should / will / can kill Instagram with it's own social photo sharing service. Over and above the fact that Apple are famously useless at anything social ('Dad, what's Ping?'), the reason for Apple being rubbish at social sharing is that their entire culture is built on secrecy. Not sharing is their business model. It also extends into their service model. You must live your life inside the iTerms and Conditions, sorry I mean - iTunes. Your apps must pass the App store quality control and even your iAds are vetted. In this context, I am not sure Apple are capable of allowing grubby little people to share stuff in the context of their brand.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
I was struck by the parallels between Jonathan Harris' new project Today and the experience of using Instagram.
I didn't?
Okay. Well, it's safe to say I am obsessed with this app and its precious, awesome community. In next to no time, all my base are belong to Instagram. It has stealthily taken apart and re-made my online life in the course of a few weeks. And it's mobile: it's an on-the-go service, not something I have to sit down and use at a desktop - so I AM talking about my *whole* life, much to the chagrin of my wife and child :)
This weekend Instagram passed 3 million users. This is massive because we're talking about 3 million iPhone users only (you can't currently add photos any other way), and in recognition of the total hotness, co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were interviewed by TechCrunch about their plans and what they think Instagram means.
Hint: it's not a mobile photo-sharing service
Like many people, I left Austin with a lot to think about. I feel as though I spent six days taking information in and just stacking it up in my mental overflow lot to wait until I have time to process it (that would be this weekend).
The conference is all about the immediate and the instant, which makes it a shift for me, as my preferred method of interaction and consumption is long-form: long chat, long article, lots of time to think. So before I wander back to my old ways, here's a short show-and-tell on the week gone by.
2011 was my first time at South By South-West. Before I left I'd been given a range of advice, from drinking my year's quota of tequila in 5 days to avoiding most of the panel based sessions harder than I'd be avoiding healthy eating. It's passed in a whirl, with each day blending into the other until now that it's all over it feels like one helluva long day has just ended, not a whole week.
So did it meet my expectations? Yes it did, and more. It was an incredibly stimulating, vibrant and inspiring experience which has left my brain spinning. But, because there has to be a but, my only issue was that it did take me a day or two to perfect picking out the good sessions to attend. I'd been warned to expect more breadth than depth, and to stay away from sessions that were too close to my day to day work, but I was initially tripped up by sessions which sold their topic very well in the programme and then turned out to be nothing more than an exercise in selling the speaker and his/her start-up/book/app during the session. If I'd wanted to listen to a marketing pitch, I didn't need to fly 10 hours across the Atlantic to find it. A good talk should put sharing value first, and self-promotion second.
