It’s been a million kind of week. Instagram, that hip photo sharing iPhone app that makes your images look like an old Polaroid™ or a Lomo, announced on Tuesday that they had passed the 1 million user mark. In just over two months, the image taking, cool filter applying, and social sharing service has gained huge traction. Nick Bilton, writing for the Bits blog in the NY Times, speaks to its addictive nature. “Over the last two months I’ve watched friends become slightly obsessed with Instagram. I have too,” says Bilton. “We constantly check to see new photos from friends and engage in chatty conversations with strangers around the globe about their images.”
What makes the service so appealing? Certainly it’s possible to share images with others on sites like Flickr, TwitPic, or Plixi? What’s different about Instagram? Bilton thinks its in the balance. “Instagram’s ease of use and balance of simplicity, speed and artistic filters,” combined with the ability to share out to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare is what is attracting users.
Wired writer Clive Thompson suggests that Instagram is successful because it’s “so perfectly simple, with none of crufty bells and whistles that plague, say, Facebook. You just see something and — boom — in about 15 seconds you’ve shared it with everyone in your network. And while, sure, there are photos on Facebook and Twitter, it turns out there’s something weirdly hypnotic about following the lives of your friends through nothing but images.”
It’s that singular focus that makes Instagram so fast. But the filters are what add such a strong artistic element to the images shared. The mundane becomes extraordinary, and the everyday becomes unique. For Thompson, Instagram has changed the way he views the world. “Instagram’s image-altering filters are a key part of my visual awakening, because they often take meh photographs and render them newly weird, making me look at the subjects in a new way.”
Instagram is available for free on the iTunes App Store.
Article Via The Next Web
