Who,what,when and where did Instagram come from?

Post no. 7

I could go all lazy and just paste the FAQ's from their site, but I won't. haha.

Okay, back to Instagram.

What is Instagram?

The name of the app itself is a combination of two words, which are 'Instant', and 'Telegram'.

According to their site, they mentioned about the world's ability to be more connected through photos. Which I find quite true since pictures do speak a thousand words as well as our eyes do tend to recognize an image quicker and reading regular texts.

Instagram is an app available on Iphones and Android devices (not yet Windows Phones) for free.

These images are said to be a way to share meaningful experiences instantly while giving the user a choice of a list of filters to help enhance the photos to give it a more 'seasoned' feel. They said that pictures that are uploaded online are quite mediocre.

 This platform also provides a more quicker, and efficient way to upload your images online as it is linked to various social networking sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Flikr. This social networking service launched in 2010 and has over a 100 million active users.

The app has recently released a video function where users are able to record a 15 second video instead of the traditional static images. You are to hold down the video record button and let go if you would like to cut the scene. Another senior app to have this function is Vine.

Users that have this app on their mobile phones are able to 'Follow' their friends or famous accounts to get updates as they are subscribed to their images.
They can 'Find Friends' on Instagram that connects to your Facebook account. By tapping the Explore button a.k.a the star icon, users are able to view famous photos of the day.

To upload the photographs, users are to tap the blue camera button in the center of the lower column. They then can choose whether they would like to have a video or an image uploaded.

Users are also able to like each others' photos by double tapping the image. They could comment on them and tag their friends when uploading the images onto Instagram. The orange pop-up is an alert on the current activity that's happening in your profile. The speech bubble signifies the unseen comments, the heart icon would represent the likes on the photos and the head icon would be the number of followers that has recently followed you.

When your followers like a photo, it would be shown like the image below under the News tab. You would able to know which images are liked or commented.

And of course, the users are able to view the number of likes under each photograph. When the number of likes exceeds 10 however, the usernames of the users will no longer be shown and will be replaced with a number.

The last icon which looks like a name card would be the profile tab for the users. As a user, you are able to change your profile picture, edit your 'About Me's' and manage your photos. The home button would be the live feed of all the photos from the people you follow.

Other than that, users are also able to share their location, which then could be located through another social app called FourSquare.

When Users upload their images, they are able to 'Hashtag'/# their photos so that they could be manually categorized in a list of other photos that are similar from different users all over the world.

Examples of famous hashtags,

#yolo  (you only live once)
#selca (self-cam)
#ootd  (outfit of the day)

Users also use hashtags to achieve more likes and followers.

Instagram has been a phenomenon on the internet world as well. Here's a video that basically summarizes what users do with their apps.


As for privacy settings, users can set their profile to public or private. The difference between the two is that the private settings do not allow other users to follow their Instagram account without their approval.

So, there's Instagram in a wrap.