Tags:apps, innovation, instagram, Mobile, photography, Social Networking, startups.
I’m late to the Instagram party (I define late as discovering my first name has already been claimed as a username; if you’re curious I’m grabbed Tylda instead) and I’m hooked. Its simplicity makes discovering images a joy and its community is overwhelmingly positive, lacking the anonymous trolls that usually plague public comment threads.
And, while photos can be posted to multiple other social networks, those connections are not visible to other users, putting the focus squarely on photography. On Instagram, who you are is defined only by how you see the world, a refreshing departure from most social networks profiles.
Most people share photos and interact with others through comments and likes. One user, @assingm3nt, innovatively built a community around his account, posting topics for photo contests to his followers and highlighting the most interesting submissions with a followup photo:
Instagram might not have predicted this use case. That’s one of the fun surprises about building something: You never know how users will interact with your product. If you listen, you can find inspiration to improve, or just enjoy the innovation.
Posted on 29 March '11 by Matylda, under Mobile, Start-ups. No Comments.
Tags:apps, check-ins, Yelp.
I’ve been experimenting with check-ins lately. When I have time to kill, like waiting in line to order, I sometimes check in on several geolocation services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, CauseWorld and Yelp. The irony is that I don’t have many real-life friends on these services (not all geeks hang out exclusively with geeks).
That is the curse of the early adopter: the ultimate benefit of some services comes from having a lot of friends using those services as well. While it’s a smart tactic to create a service that requires you to spread its use to benefit from it, I don’t enjoy repeated requests from the same person to try a service, so I don’t repeatedly bugger my friends to try a new service either. I know staunch late adopters, who still have no interest in making the leap to a smart phone, what so much as considering downloading apps. I also have enough respect for my privacy that I’m choosy about which friend requests I accept, especially with services that share my exact whereabouts. These factors combined leave me with few geolocation buddies at the moment, though I believe strongly that geolocation will be a become as common as texting and even Twitter has become, especially when Facebook moves into the space.
I’m interested to observe how and why these technologies are slowly being adopted. A friend recently came to town for a touristy whirlwind visit, providing me the opportunity to check in far more frequently than I usually do. As I checked into Yelp throughout the weekend, the app informed me of my ranking in the New York check-in microcosm. I was surprised to learn I was ranked seventh, especially since I check in rather infrequently as compared to what I’ve seen Foursquare power users do. This leads me to believe Yelp’s check-in user base is still quite small. That’s surprising given the site’s popularity, but probably representative of the slower, more skeptical pace at which geolocation is adopted outside of geeky circles.
I enjoy being an early adopter, but am also glad to have non-early-adopter friends who keep me in check when I start thinking “everyone” is using a service or hyped up about a new technology. It’s a good perspective to have.
Posted on 17 April '10 by Matylda, under Geolocation. No Comments.
