Instagram: A Network of Pictures
Instagram is a photo sharing application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that was created earlier this year and has been extremely successful, reaching almost 10 million users this month despite their small staff of 4 employees. The application works by allowing users to share moments of their lives through a series of photos which can be edited using filters that add certain effects to bring enhanced beauty to these pictures. As CEO of Instagram, Kevin Systrom puts it “..filters really allow you to enhance that, and you know, make it have a mood or a feeling that it didn’t have before…” This rather new hybrid mobile application-network quickly went international after its launch date and now has over 30% of its users overseas which has been a contributing factor to Instagram’s success.
As a social network, Instagram has great significance because it allows users to connect in the universal language of pictures; this allows people from any part of the globe to form edges between each other regardless of what language they speak. Instagram employs directional edges as users can follow each other and don’t have to follow every user who follows them and vice-versa. There are also various kinds of interactions that can help categorize these edges between nodes as being strong or weak. Users can comment on or like other users’ photos (similar to Facebook) and these interactions are more likely to take place at a higher frequency between users who are close friends or well acquainted with each other rather than between those who aren’t and so from this point of view, these directional edges can be seen as strong or weak. Instagram is a part of a larger social network that consists of several social networking websites such as Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr because it allows users to share their pictures on these other sites. Taking this into account, it is quite interesting to think about how Instagram functions as a source of bridges between the several components that exist among users/nodes that use certain networks but don’t use others such as people who only use Facebook and Twitter and those who only use Flickr and Tumblr. Instagram creates a larger, highly integrated network that is comprised of users from all these different social networks, Instagram included. The future is bright for Instagram as the network’s growth has far exceeded founders’ expectations and the company has plans of adding the application to the Android platform.
Links: http://gigaom.com/2011/06/19/why-instagram-works/