This Week's Sponsor:

PowerPhotos

The Ultimate Toolbox for Photos on the Mac

Posts tagged with "instagram"

Instaprint Could Well Be The Coolest Use Of Instagram’s API Yet

Just like the launch of Instagram itself, the Instagram API has enjoyed some substantial success with a number of cool web apps that have utilized it. But none of those really matter much at all once you see Instaprint, its not a webapp but an actual printer that can print any Instagram photo onto Polaroid-esque paper for those tagged at a certain location or with a specific hashtag.

Right now Instaprint has set up a demo box at SXSW and plans to eventually offer to rent the printers out, which sounds great for big events or promotional campaigns that want to utilise social media in a new and unique way. You can try it out right now by tagging any Instagram photo with the hashtag #Instaprint and see it being printed live in the Ustream video after the break (although as of writing it wasn’t live).

Read more

With Real-Time API, Instagram Goes Beyond the App Store

Instagram yesterday released their real-time updates API which allows other developers to integrate Instagram photos, tags and locations in their own apps. The API is already in action on a number of apps including Foodspotting, Momento and Instagre.at.

Over 2000 developers signed up for access to the API and some other popular apps and services such as Flipboard and About.me will soon be adding Instagram API into their products. However at this stage the API is read-only as Instagram works to ensure a smooth implementation of the API, which was only announced earlier this month. Instagram has a demo of what the API can achieve, with a dynamic web page updating as new photos are uploaded to Instagram.

Read more

Socialcam Aims At Becoming Instagram for Video

There is no doubt  Instagram has changed the way iOS users look at image sharing on their iPhones: with a few taps, you can take a picture with your device, apply some filters to make it “cooler”, send it to the Instagram’s cloud to share it with your friends and everyone else. Instagram’s appeal lies in the simplicity of the concept, and 2 million users in a few months can’t be wrong.

But the App Store image sharing scene isn’t just about Instagram. Service picplz has collected a pretty huge userbase lately as well, making it the direct competitor to Instagram and one of the most popular apps to quickly share photos from an iPhone. Videos, however, have always been one kind of a problem for iOS aficionados: put simply, there is no easy way to share a video with your friends. Email is slow with attachments, Facebook’s video uploading isn’t intuitive at all (and again, uploading is slow), Youtube is more meant for videos that need to be viewed publicly.

TechCrunch offers a preview of Socialcam, a new iPhone app from the creators of Justin.tv that, like Instagram, will allow users to upload videos with a few taps and share them with their friends using Facebook’s Connect feature. Socialcam, currently in beta and launching in the first weeks of March, has a tabbed interface with a huge “Camera” button in the middle similar to Instagram’s UI and will let you upload, browse videos shared by others, like and comment them.

The app, which will be available for both Android and iPhone, is pretty simple: after firing it up you’re asked to log-in via Facebook Connect, which is currently the only login option. The app presents you with a list of your Facebook friends who are already on Socialcam and asks if you’d like to ‘Follow’ them (Socialcam uses a one-way follower model like Twitter). After that, you’ll spend most of your time looking at the stream of Socialcam videos posted by your friends. Each video is represented by four frame grabs — tapping on one will cause the video player to pop open the clip will start playing immediately. You can leave comments and ‘Like’ each video, and you can also tag your friends in clips. If you tag a friend who isn’t on Socialcam, it will still show up on their Facebook wall (and the video is playable directly from there — you don’t have to click a link).

You can sign up to be notified about Socialcam news here, and hopefully more details will be available in the coming weeks ahead of the app’s launch.

Instagram Shifting Focus to an Open Platform With API

Instagram has been a phenomenal success story gaining a user base of 2 million people in just four months that are now uploading 300,000 photos a day and now the developers are inviting developers to sign up for access to an Instagram API. In a blog post, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said that the guiding principle for Instagram was to “create and maintain an open ecosystem that changes the way we see our world,” opening up Instagram to other developers is their next step to fulfilling that principle.

The opening up of a developers API seems to indicate a shift by Instagram from one of giving users an app to edit photos and share, to one dominated by creating a social image sharing service. This could allow other apps such as Hipstamatic to hook into Instagram and let users share their Hipstamatic photo’s on through Instagram. The blog post doesn’t quite make it clear if this is their intention but it most definitely seems like the logical iteration.

Read more

Instagram Gains Native Twitterrific Support

Twitterrific by the Iconfactory is one of the most popular Twitter clients for iOS, and we’ve been hearing a brand new Mac version is around the corner as well. What at first may look like a minor update to Twitterrific for iPhone and iPad was released a few minutes ago in the App Store, and it adds a very welcome new feature: native Instagram support. I don’t know if any other Twitter app for iOS supports Instagram photos like Twitterrific does, but here’s the gist: instead of being forced to follow a link to Instagram to the actual website, Twitterrific will open the image into its dedicated popover, without leaving your timeline. That’s useful, considering how many people are using Instagram these days and how annoying it is to launch a web view every time. A similar integration can be seen on Twitter.com, where the inline media viewer can preview Instagram photos without opening a new browser tab.

The new Twitterrific update also introduces fixes to reduce API errors (I’ve been getting lots of them lately), support for photos shared on plixi and step.ly and restores the black theme as the default one. Last, Twitterrific finally supports the new Twitter links to tweets and usernames.

Twitterrific is available for free in the App Store. Our review here.

Instagram 1.1 Released: Now With Hashtags

Popular photo-sharing / mobile social network Instagram has released an update to their iPhone app, which reaches version 1.1 and adds a couple of interesting new features. First off, #hashtags: called “Topics” by the Instagram developers, you can now tag your photos just like you can tag a status update on Twitter, and perform a search for that specific hashtag. Thus, topics can create alternative photo albums that have their own RSS feeds you can subscribe to and to which anyone can contribute by using the same hashtag in other photos. If you’re a Twitter user, you know the drill. As in typical Instagram fashion, it’s all very easy and user-friendly.

Instagram now has a proper comment management system, too. You can manage your own comments on other people’s photos and delete inappropriate ones on yours as well. And if you really don’t like a user, you can now flag him and block him. I guess spammers found their way onto Instagram, and now we can do some cleaning. Personally, this one’s a welcome feature.

Last, the usual bug fixes, more languages and overall improvements. No new filters this time – maybe they will come with version 1.2. Instagram 1.1 is available now in the App Store.

View Instagram’s Most Popular Photos on Instagreat!

Instagram has been a massive success but it is largely an experience that has been exclusive to its iPhone app. Not anymore though, web developers Elliott Kember and Hector Simpson have created Insta-great, a site that showcases all the most popular photo’s from Instagram.

The brilliantly designed site allows you to also drill down to photos by a specific person, in a specific place, on a specific date or photos using one of Instagram’s filters. Plus Elliot (who has a game of Snake running on top of his site!) and Hector added keyboard navigation which is another great touch to a really finessed site.

If you’re a fan of Instagram like I am, definitely check the site out, you’ll find yourself just scrolling through the photos for ages.

[Via Cult of Mac]

Monetizing The iPhone’s Photo Apps→

Monetizing The iPhone’s Photo Apps

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on the difficulties faced by developers when trying to make apps like Instagram, Hipstamatic and PicPlz profitable. Speaking of Hipstamatic:

Since Hipstamatic’s launch in December 2009, the $1.99 app has been downloaded more than 1.7 million times. The app allows users to choose different lenses, films and flashes. The firm charges 99 cents for a package of add-ons such as infrared.

The company generates a third of its revenue from those extras, says CEO Lucas Buick, and is profitable. In September, it launched a service where users can send in photos and pay a fee for printed copies.

The app has been named “iPhone App of the Year” by Apple and it’s got lots of additional stuff and features to unlock with in-app purchase. The app is a one-time $1.99 purchase, but developers can keep the money coming in with updates and new items to buy. So far, it seems like this business model is working.

Permalink