Instagram - Twitter for your photos

The iPhone1 has been one of the best innovations of all time. The sheer power and magic of apps on iPhone have taken it to the next level. Let’s not forget the ecosystem it has built for our beloved developers to write an app and, at the same time, make money off it!

Apple allows 70% of revenues from the store to instantly go to the seller of the app, and 30% go to Apple.

There are more than 250,000 third-party applications officially available on the App Store. Android marketplace, for that matter, is chasing it fast!

Earlier this week, I came across a yet another photo-sharing app called Instagr.am. At the first look, it looks to be a yet another Flickr2 app clone or something that does nothing different than what the existing apps would allow me to do. Using it for 3 days, made me change notions and talk about it.

Instagram app has a several, Lomography3 ‘filters’ to add fizz to the shots the iPhone takes otherwise. On top of that, it has an icing of a social feature that allows you to share the pictures with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr and Tumblr. Not just that, the pictures get shared within the Instagram network too. Though the network doesn’t have too many friends of mine to see who’s sharing what, but with time, I am sure, the scene will change.

It’s like you take pictures wherever you go and share them across all the major social networks with one central app. Additionally, it can communicate with the Foursquare API. What that means is that when you allow the picture to get a geo-tag, it intelligently updates your FourSquare4 account with the location as the pictures go live!

You can look for your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or even your iPhone contacts to see if they already use Instagram. If you find them, you can add them to the Instagram network and keep track of what, when, and where they share pictures. You can add comments and explore the most popular images from across the people who are already using the app.

One downside is that you cannot save a picture if you like it or wish to set it as your iPhone’s wallpaper.

The app’s user interface is sleek and intuitive. You may not need to be a geek to know how it works. It is not an app that one would use and forget. You’ll probably set it to be your default hit when it comes to sharing the next “twitpic.” There are more than a dozen “filters” to apply, and you can publish as many photos as you like for free! The app supports 3G, 3GS, and iPhone 4 phones.

Last edited on Jun 5, 2025.

  1. The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company’s own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at Macworld 2007, and launched later that year. India saw the introduction of the iPhone with the second generation of the iPhone, iPhone 3G in 2008. ↩

  2. Flickr is an image and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a common way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. It has changed ownership several times and has been owned by SmugMug since April 20, 2018. ↩

  3. Lomo photography, or Lomography, is a style of photography that emphasizes spontaneity and creativity, often using simple, low-cost cameras that produce images with unique imperfections like vignetting and color distortions. It originated in the early 1990s when a group of students discovered the LOMO LC-A camera and embraced its quirky aesthetic, leading to a movement that celebrates casual and experimental photography. ↩

  4. Foursquare is a geolocation technology company and data cloud platform based in the United States. Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009, the company rose to prominence with the launch of its local search-and-discovery mobile app. ↩