Thursday, August 16, 2012

BuzzFeed - Latest: The New Instagram Is All About Where You Are

BuzzFeed - Latest
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thumbnail The New Instagram Is All About Where You Are
Aug 17th 2012, 00:47

There's a brand new Instagram. It looks a lot like the old Instagram, but there's a big new feature: Photo Maps.

The new Instagram might not look all that different —  you might notice it's spiffed up here and there — but it does something pretty radical that the old Instagram didn't: It organizes all of your photos on a giant map. Which, okay, doesn't sound all that nuts. But it's nutsier than you might realize.

In an interview with TechCrunch, founder Kevin Systrom reveals just profound the change is, or at least will be: "We realized that chronological order was not the way we wanted you to browse overall, and we decided that location was more important.”

Even with the update, the primary organizing principle in Instagram is still time. When you open it and go to homescreen, you still see a reverse chronological stream of photos. When you click on a photo in the tab Explore, the major point of metadata you see is how long it's been since the photo was posted; and there's still no way to use the Explore tab to poke around photos taken nearby.

Source: vimeo.com

But when you click on a friend's profile — or your own — you'll see the option to check out the Photo Map, which maps out the precise location of every single geotagged photo you or your friend has taken and allowed Instagram to put on the Photo Map. When you fire up the new Instagram for the first time, it'll present a list of every single photo you've geotagged. (Which may be far more than you realized, since Instagram never overtly surfaced geotag data in photos before, unless you checked in to a specific place. Example: This photo is geotagged and shows up on my Photo Map, but you can't see that location data at this link or in an Instagram stream. But in this photo, because I tagged a specific place, you can see where the East River Bar bar is. Plus, once you turned the location option, it stayed on by default.) You can then pick which photos you want Instagram to put on your Photo Map. As Systrom enthuses, it is a genuinely powerful way to experience photos, like "going back into your bedroom and opening your shoeboxes," because of the way it resurfaces older photos that were previously buried at the bottom of a very long river of images. So it might be more accurate to say that, in a way, it explodes the tops off your old shoeboxes, permanently.

So why create something that intensely cool and kinda bury it in people's profiles? Because location still freaks people out. I know some people think "persons upset on Twitter" stories are like, whatever, but a scan of "Instagram map shit" and general sentiment is revealing.


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