With Instagram in the news often recently, we’ve been asking around to see who has used the application and had some fun with it. Tom and Patrick gave us some interesting feedback, and we wanted to pass it along. Interested in Patrick’s thoughts? Check out Part 2.
Tom’s Take: Amateur to “Aww, That’s Sick!” in an Instant with Instagram
For some reason, I never got into the whole photo-sharing thing at first. MySpace? No, I didn’t upload photos there. I was too annoyed by those darn “bathroom mirror” shots that everyone had as his or her default. Facebook made it easier to share images but I never curated my own albums. Friends would tag me and I would delete those that were unsuitable for public consumption but my activity stopped there. Flickr was next. I tried signing up for an account and stopped immediately when I realized that it was powered by Yahoo! Screw that – I was a Google man. Then came Twitter. I used yFrog and Twitpic whenever I wanted to tweet a sweet shot but it wasn’t an ideal platform to browse through friends’ photos or maintain an online library of my own. And who wanted to take the time to touch up a photo in a third party app and then upload? I sure didn’t…
The iPhone 4S and I wed on February 27. I was a long-timer Android user so I had to convert my tech faiths in order to make the marriage valid. It didn’t take long before I fell in love with the new format and started downloading apps that were custom to iOS. Instagram was on my list. I had seen the fantastic shots taken by friends while I had my Samsung Fascinate and was in awe that an amateur user could take such neat pictures. I had to give it a try!
After one photo, I was hooked. The interface was super user-friendly and the concept simple. In case you don’t read any social media news sites or tech blogs, Android finally added Instagram to its app portfolio last week. It was long awaited by Droid users and long overdue. I didn’t even have to read about the official announcement – I watched throughout the day as a flood of online friends (on Droid) joined the Instagram community and added me to their lists. Even as an Apple user who was already enrolled, I was just as excited. Now, the other 55% of the mobile community would be able to experience one of the best social apps around.
And if that news wasn’t big enough, just this morning, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook has decided to buy Instagram for $1 billion. Although I’m not thrilled about Facebook running the photo company, I’m excited to know that Instagram will now have more features and more users – making for an even more entertaining environment.
