Rev Dan Catt's Blog

And so the final part of the Instagram trilogy, that of Social Graph, register and where’s my sodding profile page?!

Instagram has two interesting features, no privacy controls and no straightforward website or profile page. The latter means it essentially lives on your phone (although web & desktop API driven clients exist), at a pinch there’s a web presence where you can link to an image but it’s not really designed to be used like that. The lack of privacy controls, also by design, is just keeping things as simple as possible. Instagram is pretty much all about getting the photo from the camera into the ‘stream’ as quickly and simply as possible. Which is why I like it.

But not having a “website” for it feels odd for a web-native (rather than a mobile-native) like me.

A while back Maciej wrote an interesting essey on the Social Graph, the way in which different sites enforce relationships with other people, I’ll get back to that in a second though.

First, Privacy…

The whole essay Maciej wrote is worth a read and will probably give you a better background for where I’m coming from. But here’s the pull quotes…

“The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long – image, timestamp, text.”

Instagram is that, something cool to do (taking photos), a way to talk to each other (by following someone & leaving comments) and three fields (image, timestamp, title).

While other networks force you into odd constructs of your social network, who are friends, close friends, family, co-workers, maybe they’re dead, you’ve split up and so on. And the more edge-cases are found the more fields engineers put into databases to account for them (or indexes) until you end up with Google+ or Facebook. Maciej continues…

“Now tell me one bit of original culture that’s ever come out of Facebook.”

There’s none of this in Instagram, however privacy (for me) at its very basic level works like this; because the App exists in the phone, only other people with the App on their phone who have then chosen to follow me will see my photos.

I know this is a lie: http://statigr.am/revdancatt

I know really my photos are public (in the same way I assume all my tweets are public, even DMs), but generally people aren’t going to stumble over them.

But this effects the Flickr/Instagram difference. With Flickr I’ll maybe take a whole bunch of photos at an event (recently Christmas) then upload maybe 12-20 of my favourite. This isn’t a problem because that’s what it’s for, uploading and sharing photos, and by its nature it doesn’t shove all 20 of those photos down my followers’ throats. This is good, I like it.

I wouldn’t however do that with Instagram, the register of conversation is wrong for that. People, or at least those I follow tend to upload 1 or 2 photos of what they are currently doing, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone produce a flood of photos. In return I don’t upload 20 photos in one go as I would with Flickr.

My behaviour on Instagram is different because the society constructed there, by my friends, appears to have defined the common rules by which we’ll play in this Instagram space.

This difference is down pretty much purely to the presentation of the ‘your contacts’ photos, one a constant stream that is the interface, and one that has been much discussed here: http://blog.timoni.org

I don’t for the record agree with everything stated there but the comments are an interesting read.

That’s one of the main reasons my use of Flickr & Instagram is different.

But back to the Social Graph...

This is how I use Instagram, I suspect its probably not like this for most people.

When you upload a photo with Instagram you can very quickly chose other services to send the photo to, this isn’t an extra step its on the same page as adding the title and telling the thing to fly – be free.

I have 3 services set up;

1. Flickr
2. Twitter
3. Facebook

I already have 3 different Social Graphs on 3 different networks, Instagram doesn’t need to replicate that Social Graph yet again, thank goodness. But I’m free to use the ones I have.

I said yesterday that I wasn’t worried too much about the apparently temporal nature of Instagram photos. That isn’t strictly true, if I take a shot I particularly like and want to be able to easily find again in the future (or it’s a good one where all three kids happen to be smiling at the same time!) I send it off to Flickr. By doing so I’m essentially also sending it to my relatives as that’s where they go to find out what I’m up-to and look at photos of the kids smiling.

I also have two pretty distinct groups of friends, Facebook friends who tend to be less ‘techie’ are mainly friends from back at Uni. Twitter are my techie friends plus a whole bunch of people who’ve chosen to follow me for whatever reasons they have.

Some Instagram photos I also send off to Facebook when I think those friends will find it interesting. Other photos I’ll send to Twitter, which are similar to those that stay on Instagram but I think are of interest to a wider ‘audience’ (for want of a better word) or support or bring context to something I’ve been tweeting about anyway.

This way I can control the register of photo conversation, some are for family and some for friends who don’t use Instagram, some are special and I want to keep and others are ‘private’ between myself and those who also play the Instagram game and follow me.

Again I understand this is somewhat of an illusion, although one that seems to work as a loosely connected web of services and contexts, without the need for database enforced friends & contacts stuff.

It’s also why I don’t think there should be only one photo service to rule them all, without all the other Social Networks Instagram possible wouldn’t work for me. Since they exists though and Instagram intergrates them so seamlesly I’m free to use them (and it) as suits me.

And I think that brings me pretty much to the end of this unexpected Instagram trilogy and all I want to write on the Flickr/Instagram subject for the moment. Or maybe I’ll convert the whole thing to slides and turn it into a 10 minute talk or something ;)

[Previously: Instagram and Flickr, the one where I refine my argument]

So, part 2 of a trilogy of posts it seems, and a response to the responses. Yesterday pulled up a couple of view-points about Flickr and “proper” photography, I’m going to pull the same whole damn quote from Aaron that Paul did (sorry Paul)…

“We did a lot of stuff wrong during my time at Flickr but if I had to highlight one thing we fucked up it was somehow creating an environment where people started to believe that their photos were not good enough for Flickr. I mean, really, how did we ever let that happen? I was speechless the first time a friend said that me and for the record: It was never part of the plan. How did we ever let people think that there is one measure of photography? How did we let people imagine that a medium which gave the world both Ansel Adams and Garry Winogrand (a photographer who died with a reported 10, 000 rolls of undeveloped film in his studio and who said that every time you take a picture you are hopefully risking failure) and everyone else in between was about any other than the joy and the discovery of the possible, foofy equipment and technique and measures of “good”-iness be damned?”

/via http://notes.husk.org originally from http://www.aaronland.info. And the line from Dan W, that Paul also pulls (sorry Paul)…

“Why I never got into flickr: it’s for ‘proper’ photographers only and my friends weren’t on there.”

In an attempt at originality I’m going to pull an additional quote from Aaron from the same post, which was actually totally about something else and so is utterly out of context here (sorry Aaron)…

“We are hard-wired for photos or more precisely still images (I’ve got six thousand years worth of claims that “painting is dead” to back up that outrageous claim, by the way) and they come with enough emotional baggage and social triggers that they deserve to be treated with care and thought. At the very least they deserve to be guaranteed some degree of permanence.”

…emphasis mine.

I’m not, for the record switching to Instagram from Flickr, I have room for both, yesterday’s post was about how my focus on seeing what my friends were upto had shifted from one to the other. To mangle someone else’s phrase into my own:

Flickr is for the story I want to remember, Instagram is for the story I want to tell now.

To me Flickr isn’t just a dumping ground for images, it’s a narrative, something I want to look back at to remember and remind myself what was happening. And for that to work I attempt to keep roughly to correct chronological order. Because these memories are important to me, and I want them to be treated with care and thought, I got myself a decent camera that can handle shooting fast moving kids in dark badly lit rooms (I don’t intentionally keep kids in dark badly lit rooms, but rather the reality of English weather and energy saving bulbs). I take quite a few photos with it. The trouble is that it can take a few days to find the time to sort through all those “proper” photos, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who feels like they have a backlog of photos they want to upload. It isn’t that I can only upload “Proper” photos to Flickr, rather that Flickr is the only place for me to upload them, and while I have a backlog I want to avoid posting quickly snapped photos out of order, although sometimes I do anyway.

Instagram is the narrative of now, I don’t feel particularly precious about them, I don’t tend to go back and look through old photos. It doesn’t matter that the shots I shoot with it are of lower resolution with a cameraphone lens, that they have filters, these are my transient photos (I understand this isn’t the case for everyone and Instamatic photos can be an art). I don’t need a central place where I can always find them, instead it’s a pooled visual stream of consciousness of myself and the people I know.

The problem for me never was that Flickr was for “Proper” photos, but rather it never exchanged the immediacy of the moment with friends particularly well (see the Contacts Page passim). But for years it was the best damn thing and that’s where the conversations of “now” revolved. Instagram is just that though; Insta, in a way Flickr isn’t. But Flickr is “proper” in a way Instagram isn’t.

It’s not that I’m going to use one over the other, that’s crazy talk, it’s that one was more magical in the moment of Christmas morning in a way the other wasn’t. I would hope that Christmas 2011 is more magical on Flickr in 10 years time though :)

[Update: Flickr, Instagram, the Social Graph and Interfaces effecting behaviour]
[Previously: My first Instagram Christmas, a nervous step away from Flickr]

A curious thing happened this holiday season, I kinda fell in love with Instagram just a little bit, and out of love with Flickr, just a little bit. Which, given that I used to work at Flickr way back in the day is an odd feeling.

When Instagram first came out I scoffed at it, filters, borders, faux retro and all that, me, I was sticking with Flickr. Flickr had all my friends on, it’s where the comments and conversations took place, everyone was over at Flickr, I’d invested years into it so why switch (or augment it with other tools)?

And then Instagram rolled out version 2, allowing much larger images to be stored and the ability to get rid of the sodding borders. People I follow on twitter started mentioning good things about it, I of course ignored them, ’cause Flickr is where it’s at don’t cha know! Then I caved in and downloaded it.

Suddenly I discovered that most of my Flickr friends were already on it, and they were having conversations on Instagram, sharing jokes, punning photos around hash-tags, generally having a good time, even though it wasn’t Flickr. Even though they were posting the photos to Flickr, the party it seems had mainly moved to Instagram.

It’s like they’d all been having photo fun behind my back… bastards!

How dare they be using something else while I was faithfully still using Flickr.

So ignoring that fact that I’d help build Flickr I started snapping away with Instagram, it was easy, frictionless, and dare I say it, I even liked some of the filters. Everything that the Flickr iPhone app wasn’t.

Then Christmas happened…

The days before Christmas, friends were sharing photos of the build-up, putting up the tree, wrapping presents, sitting on trains getting to parents houses, cooking hams. To me there was a real sense of flow, connection, joining in of everyone’s experience, a bit like a pictorial version of twitter to some degree.

Christmas morning was almost magical.

The previous year on Flickr was almost as magical, once people had a chance to sort through the 100s of photos they’d taken with their dSLR, pick out the best ones, run them through lightroom and then get a chance to upload them. It was nice to look back on the Christmas mornings that people had, rather than having.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy Flickr. It makes me think about photography, inspires possible projects to play with, upload proper photos taken with my proper camera. But when there’s something happening (often involving the kids, a cat or a visual joke I know my friends will get) I find myself reaching for the iPhone and uploading to Instagram.

This Christmas I kinda fell in love with Instagram just a little bit, and out of love with Flickr, just a little bit.

[Update: Instagram and Flickr, the one where I refine my argument]