Why Instagram Is So Popular: Quality, Audience, & Constraints. Editor’s note: Guest contributor Nate Bolt runs the UX firm Bolt | Peters, teaches design research at SVA iXD, and made that one SF to Paris time lapse. I get asked a lot why Instagram is so popular. It might be because we just threw the first iPhone photography conference, 1197, or because I allegedly run a company that studies and designs interfaces. It could also be the world of photography is changing so fast that lots of us nerds are talking about how a tool like Instagram can pass 10 million users in 355 days. The interface implications are fascinating, the company and technology dynamics of serving content to 10 million users with less than ten employees are fascinating, the artistic content is fascinating, and the reasons why people like me are so addicted to the damn thing are fascinating. Here’s a crack at why, since I think some other attempts haven’t quite captured it.
Quality Audience It’s not just social, stupid. So you have the nicer quality in Instagram, but so what? Instagram, Hipstamatic and the mobile photography movement. Lytro’s Camera Lets You Shoot First and Focus Later. Lytro: The $50M Tech That May Change Photography Forever. That click you just heard? That was the sound of photography as we know it changing. Lytro is a Silicon Valley startup that's building on research carried out by CEO Ren Ng at Stanford, and its promise is simple: With its light field camera hardware and software, it could change photography in an almost unimaginable number of ways--starting with the thing that most news sites have picked up on this morning, the lack of a need to focus a photo. Meanwhile, Lytro's $50 million in startup capital has come from big names like Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock, and its technological team includes a cofounder of Silicon Graphics and the man who was the chief architect for Palm's revolutionary webOS software.
So what's the fuss all about? It's called light field, or plenoptic, photography, and the core thinking behind Lytro is contained neatly in one paper from the original Stanford research--though the basic principle is simple. And this is where things get freaky. But that's not all. Instagram et la photographie 2.0.