Instagram = Multiplayer Lomography

• January 13, 2011
• 8 notes

It’s been fun the past few months playing with Instagram.  I only have a few friends on there, but nonetheless it’s carved out a nice little niche in my oversharing life that something like hipstamatic never did.  

2 Things though: 1) I’m using it less.  2) Pretty sure my friends are also using it less.  I might just be that it’s settling into a groove of people posting stuff 3-4 times per week vs. the 3-4 times per day I was witnessing at the outset.  But it also may be that the fun of it all is kind of wearing off, and the little annoyances of the system are causing me & others to use apple’s Camera app by default, and instagram only in certain fewer and farther between instances.  At the core of it, Instagram is not so much a normal photography app, but rather Multiplayer Lomography.

The question is not is that fun, or cool, or whatever, because it is, but is it something I’m going to keep using after a few months.  Will it sustain my interest?  Does it have a shelf life?  Currently if I take a picture using Instagram, it has little or no value to me unless I share it.  The image filtering happens not on the original pixels, but on a much smaller, web-and-proccessor-friendly set, which is what is stored to your phone.  You lose all the pixels and details of your image, and it becomes basically worthless.  The magic is in your social network, getting “likes” and so-forth.  As a result, the success of the experience is directly tied to the player’s social network.  I think this is why a lot of people I know who aren’t heavy social networkers prefer stuff like plastic bullet or hipstamatic, apps that have tighter “single player” experiences.

I’m really interested in how apps are built, and how their development parallels video game development.  In video games you almost *can’t* make a single player game anymore, and I’m wondering if the same shift is happening in app development.