As part of my normal routine I go for a walk in the morning. Most mornings I take a picture of something that I find interesting, some days I take a video. The pictures are taken on my iPhone and posted directly to Instagram.
The Instagram client on my iPhone has all sorts of features available for enhancing the picture before it’s posted – filter, brightness, warmth, saturation, fade, shadows, vignette, etc. I tend to post pictures without too many enhancements, but it’s fun to fiddle sometimes.
Instagram has a reputation for pictures of three things: pets, selfies and food. I don’t have any pets, I rarely post selfies, I sometimes post food pictures, or more normally coffee pictures.
Similar to Facebook and Twitter, Instagram has a concept of followers which allows you to create social interactions and to see what others have posted. The people who I follow tend not to post pictures of pets, selfies or food.
Like other social network platforms Instagram allows people to interact. In the case of Instagram interaction is via likes and comments. You can also post links to Facebook and Twitter which create other avenues for interaction.
While writing this post I’ve considered a question – why do I use Instagram? I started using Instagram because it did something unique, Twitter didn’t really handle pictures at the time you had to use third-party capabilities, Facebook always handled pictures, but it’s functionality is aimed at collections and albums of pictures. Twitter now supports pictures quite well, but I continue to use Instagram. Why continue as part of another social network? I tried to come up with a logical reason involving features and capabilities, but the answer is far simpler. I continue to use Instagram because I like it.
If you want to interact you can find me here: @grahamchastney
Graham Chastney 