MG Siegler over at TechCrunch drew to our attention that National Geographic (@natgeo on Instagram) signed on with popular iPhone photo sharing service, Instagram, as its first content partner a couple of days ago.
What does this mean for Instagram users? Co-Founder Kevin Systrom explained to TechCrunch:
“National Geographic makes a ton of sense as an initial partner – they’re a fantastic company with such a rich visual history. Given that they’re so visually oriented, it’s a no-brainer that we’re going to be trying some interesting stuff out with them over the next few months,”
“They’ve also got a huge photographer/reporter base that could contribute images ‘on the ground’ as things happen — imagine a ‘live’ version of National Geographic. But again, this is all very early, and we’re excited to figure out how NG and other brands can fully utilize our platform,”
I’ve found that some of the best photos on the service are of environments and “found” scenes, so National Geographic definitely seems like a good partner to bring aboard.
As of today (11/30), National Geographic has yet to put up any photos, but they do have the above note as an announcement/teaser/placeholder picture on their Instagram account. I’m curious to see what sort of activity ”photo challenges” entails. It could be an interesting twist on photo sharing to add a little “game” to the service.
What’s that? You haven’t heard of Instagram?
It’s a free photo sharing iPhone app you should seriously consider checking out if you take photos at all with your phone. It has an extremely simple interface and is great at three things:
- Taking new and existing photos and applying filters to them – making them look pretty cool in a retro/arty kinda way (you don’t have to apply a filter if you don’t want to)
- Sharing photos with all of your social networks at the same time – it’s as simple as toggling an on/off button to post to whichever of your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare accounts that you want.
- React to your friends’ photos right on your phone via tapping “like” button or leaving a comment.
There are a few downsides to the service though. First of all, it’s only on iOS at the moment so if you don’t have an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, you can’t contribute to the party. Secondly, there’s no web interface to speak of yet. While you can view specific photos linked on social media feeds on your computer browser, you can’t browse your feed or your friends’ feeds on the web (you can view individual feeds via the app though).
Finally, there’s already a backlash against the use of filters by Instagram users. We’re going to file that under the “people who need to worry about more important things” category. We may not be professional photographers, but more often than not, the filters end up making our less than pristine photos look presentable.
The company’s actually an interesting story from the perspective of a startup. Like Twitter before it, Instagram wasn’t the initial project that founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger came to work on. That project was actually Burbn, a location based app. After a year of work, they decided to pivot and scrap the app in order to produce what is now Instagram in just 8 weeks. The rest, as they say, is history.
If you’re a regular social media user you may have noticed a steady proliferation of http://instagr.am photo share links in the last couple of months amongst your friends and followers. You’re not just seeing things – in just over a month, the service has garnered 500,000 users. To put that number in perspective, it took Foursquare seven months to get just 60,000 users.
I’d get used to it, because Instagram looks like a service that’s here to stay.
