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;
- Flickr
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]
[...] « My first Instagram Christmas, a nervous step away from Flickr Flickr, Instagram, the Social Graph and Interfaces effecting behaviour. [...]
“I don’t think I’ve seen anyone produce a flood of photos [on Instagram].”
I did that once, a few months ago; it was the local carnival and I took at least one photo of most of the floats and street performers as I stood at the roadside… and there were almost 150 of them. #cringe
I didn’t think about the implications of using Instagram to shoot them at the time. I just wanted to capture as much of what was happening as I could, and my phone was the most convenient way of doing this.
As it turned out, I only got one (jokey) complaint, and quite a few likes from all sorts of people—some friends, some new contacts I’d not seen before.
In hindsight, I would never have spammed my friends’ timelines like this intentionally. (And I probably should have used a dedicated camera instead, too.) It’s just ever-so-slightly annoying that every photo gets pushed to every follower on Instagram automatically. But then Instagram is a conversation and not a collection, as you say.
I do prefer Instagram as a default handy camera, though. In this instance, the filters really helped pull detail out of the night time shots on the fly, making them more exaggerated and fun.
But it would’ve been nice to have kept them all separate by default and only then push my favourites into the stream later.
Would I ever expect to see “Instagram” as a publish option, like Twitter and Facebook, within the Instagram app? Probably not, but it might make it all the more popular if did allow just that little bit extra of fine control—privacy (at least perceived) or otherwise.