Instagram shows that pictures are worth a thousand words, as photo streaming becomes a phenomenon

About a year ago, someone suggested I write about a little photo app that went by the not-veryinteresting name of Instagram. Something inspired by telegrams, I gather. It was an iPhone camera app and allowed users to take a picture, run it through one of 16 filters, and upload it into a stream of photos from other users. I didn’t see the big deal with that—and decided not to bother one with one little app in a sea of photo apps. Bad call. Instagram turned out to be no ordinary app. In fact, it ended up becoming a huge phenomenon, with 15 million users, including President Obama and General Electric. Plus the usual celebrities, of course. Looking at Instagram today (and yes, I’m an addicted user as well) it makes you wonder whether just about anything can be made to become a social network. Theoretically, it’s possible. We all saw how the Kolaveri song, admitted to be silly even by its creator, went wildly viral. Is it then entirely random, acquiring a life of its own for no fathomable reason? Sometimes, but not always. Instagram actually got many things right. The idea behind it was to capture wordless moments in your life and instantly and very simply upload them to share with others—as they happen. If you see someone walking by with a bright attractive handbag, it catches your eye, you snap it and off it goes into the stream. You wake up and particularly like the way the sunlight is lighting up your ceiling; you click and share the moment then and there with nothing further that needs to be said. Your cat looks at you accusingly because you haven’t given her any treats and within seconds you’re laughing about the look with other cat-owners on Instagram— easily findable, with a hashtag #catsofinstagram. The soft cross-processed filters gave the photos the look of a captured memory, adding to an experience which turns out to be appealing and addictive. Though you could share photos in many places, Facebook included and not forgetting the photoexclusive Flickr, using Instagram was a different feeling. And so it was that the app, which you can download for free on an iOS device, saw a rise so meteoric that it has significantly contributed to the iPhone becoming more popular than digital cameras. The app became a whole social network—the Twitter of photographs, in a sense—but far warmer and without the pressure of having to aim for some standard of quality. On Twitter, you could have arguments and agreements about your content or links, but on Instagram, you share whatever quality you like and some people will admire it. Unless you plan to be on the Popular page or win Instagram contests, which means you have to watch your photography skills. A word on the photography. It’s typically photos taken on the iPhone and the Instagram filters, now imitated by hundreds of other photo apps, make up a current trend in lo-fi images. The theory is that these ‘bad’ photos which look as if they’re taken with a toy camera, take away from realism but in doing so, add ambiguity, atmosphere and room for interpretation. This fires the imagination of viewers, much the same as black-and-white photography does, and engages them more deeply. For Instagram, it’s more than just the pictures and filters. It’s the community. Natural communities form and become active at sharing and engaging. These could be made up of people who actually know each other offline, but the community could just as easily spring up around a shared interest— which in turn often means a grouping of people according to shared values or beliefs. A group of teenagers, for example, readily band together via photographs only they find amusing. Another group could consist of parents who are eager to engage with others who feel a similar love for their children and document their lives in photos. The Instagram app isn’t worthy of mention because it's a great app, but because it teaches a few important social lessons. First, make sure there is content that will appeal and give an opportunity to engage. Second, make it easy for people to engage. This Instagram does by keeping the interface dead simple. Third, get out of the way and let the community form itself. This too, Instagram does rather well, by keeping a benign eye on happenings rather than tweaking and interfering too much. The users of Instagram have loved it so much that a bunch of artists got together and created ‘sonic postcards’ or ambient musicscapes based on some of the photographs they selected. While you may not be setting out to create a social network, these lessons apply to whatever content you do put out online —whether it’s a tweet or a whole website, a YouTube channel based around your business or cause, or your Facebook page.