Derek Steen, friend and co-worker, on Twitter.
First, @cdevroe removes comments from his blog. Now, he’s uploading DSLR photographs to Instagram. Talk about hipster…
— Derek Steen (@djsteen) March 23, 2012
I realize he was poking fun. But I wanted to address this topic anyway so I thought I might as well reply to him here.
Oh, and if Twitter would allow Google to properly index my tweets I’d be able to call up a tweet from at least a year ago wherein I called people out for cheating on Instagram by uploading photos that were not taken with an iPhone. I’ll be installing Tweet Nest later to see if I can rectify this issue.
So, yes, at one point I was angry with Instagram users for sharing their DSLR photos on the app. But something has changed lately and I knew it was coming.
Two days ago Instagram and Hipstimatic (another camera app for iPhone) let it leak through FastCompany that Hipstimatic photos were going to be sharable on the Instagram network. Here is what Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom was quoted as saying.
"It’s a step in the direction that we’re testing out. We’ve been very careful about making sure that Instagram photos are about what’s happening right now in your life, and we want to allow for more of those photos to end up on Instagram regardless of where they’re taken."
They’d like Instagram photos to be about what’s happening right now in your life. Certainly the name lends to this sort of network – and I’d hate to draw the correlation to Twitter’s own motto – but suffice to say – they are beginning to view themselves more as a network of people sharing photos than they do as a camera application.
So, while before I thought it was going against the creator’s grain to share just any old photo via Instagram, I now think this will be their direct intent. Sure, my last few bird photos on Instagram were not about what’s happening right now because I took those photos over the course of the last two weeks – but I’m willing to bend the rules a little from time-to-time.
I’m cdevroe on Instagram by the way.
