

Instagram Now Adding 130,000 Users Per Week - BvS
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/10/instagram-adding-130000-users-per-week/

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joebananas
And I have to wonder how many of those users will come to regret that they
shot all their babby-pictures in some deliberately cruddy format instead of
the best possible available to them.

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pclark
You can ask Instagram to save the photo unfiltered too.

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joebananas
But people don't.

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jsm386
I've been using Instagram casually for a couple of weeks while I've been
playing with the API and I never realized this was even an option. A line of
text on the profile tab of the app, 'More options are in the Settings app' is
confusing.

I wonder what the reason for sticking that option over there is? If it had
been on the app's settings/profile tab I would have set it a while ago.

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pclark
it's a (somewhat stupid) iOS recommended design pattern

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beck5
This sort of story reminds me no idea has (or can) been executed perfectly, a
year ago I would have said Flickr has photo sharing sewn up...

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bmelton
I still agree that they do, for one. I mean, obviously, the market is fickle,
and will go where other people are, even if it's not the best tool on the
market -- but Flickr's toolset is amazing and insanely capable.

The major difference though, is that Instagram has carved out a niche in the
photo sharing market that Flickr doesn't have -- casual, lower-quality photos.
IMO, Flickr (and SmugMug, to a large degree) became the place to go if you're
a serious, or at least semi-serious photographer. More value is placed on the
quality and 'interestingness' of the photo -- the majority of those photos are
taken via DSLRs and high-quality gear, not iPhones / Androids.

I don't necessarily see Instagram as competition to Flickr, but I think it's
safe to say that if Yahoo keeps Flickr stagnant, we'll see others gaining
traction in this space as well.

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dailo10
That's impressive growth! They've carved out a niche for mobile photo sharing
with their iPhone app. Now they're letting developers extend on the web via
the API.

People usually talk about viral growth on Facebook, but Instagram has
recreated it on the iPhone platform. And they haven't even released their
Android version yet!

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naithemilkman
Wow, they completely exposed their data set. Don't see many companies giving
away cohort retention details like this.

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chrismiller
The post was written by a 3rd party and not Instagram. The last section of the
article explains how they managed to get the data:

"Four things allowed us to conduct this analysis: Instagram’s new API, their
use of incrementing ID numbers to represent users and photos, the central
limit theorem"

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dreamux
Unfortunately, this isn't very rigorous - the dataset can easily be gamed by
instagram.

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ajays
If the Instagram guys have read this
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem> , they might be having a
good laugh...

