| August 16, 2012

Instagram 3.0: A Cause for Celebration and/or Tears

As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am a bit of an Instagram fanatic.  It even says so in my twitter bio.  I wrote a post about Instagram way back in January 2011 that has received more than 60,000 hits.  I tend to take this Instagram thing pretty seriously.  Which I why when I saw the latest update I wanted to cry.

Instagram has (once again) brilliantly anticipated its users wishes/desires/wants/needs and added a really useful maps feature to version 3.0, which was released this morning.    This feature pins your photos that have been geotagged on a map, nicely piled up in the locations you’ve been to and been dutifully Instagram-ing (is that a verb? and does it have one or two ‘m’s?) your life away.

This allows you to go back and revisit your vacations or events, or just get a birdseye view of where you’ve been, versus where you are right now which is what Instagram has always been good at.  The feature allows you to see where anyone on Instagram has been, as long as they are geotagging their photos.  This improves upon one of the original reasons I fell in love with Instagram…it allows you to learn more about people around the globe and get a glimpse into their lives.  So the people that I follow that travel a lot, and many of them seem to, I can easily take a look and get the big picture of what their travel log looks like.  I’m certainly hoping Sam Morrison (aka @samthecobra) has had his geotagging enabled this summer because he has literally been AROUND THE WORLD, and it would be a shame if that wasn’t somehow permanently etched on Instagram.

Which brings me to the reason I’m writing this post, other than to alert you to go download the new version.

I didn’t have my geotagging enabled!?!

 

Yes, I understand this is a #firstworldproblem.  However, I’ve uploaded 1,261 photos to Instagram.  I’ve travelled all over the country.  Only SEVEN of my pictures have a location.  So while I’m seeing my Instagram friends Anthony Quintano and dens and takinyerphoto adding literally HUNDREDS of photos to their Instagram maps, I can only add 7.   This is a personal and professional mistake the likes of which I can barely comprehend.  How embarrassing!  Especially when that number shows up in the feed of everyone who follows you.  

And I call myself an Instagrammer?

I have fixed the problem going forward, but I cannot resurrect those lost locations and now pin the photos to the map where they rightly belong.  I just have to begin again.

So why does this matter?

Moments and Memories

I have heard these words, moments and memories, bandied about a lot lately.  Klout is touting their new ‘Moments‘ feature although few have seen it yet.  Yesterday I listened to a pitch from a startup called Scrapsule that wants to help you preserve your memories in a digital scrapbook.  It seems everyone is trying to capture what used to be stored in our heads, or in frames and albums, somewhere online.

I believe that these companies are tapping into a true human need.  As we’ve spent the last couple of years filling the social networks with our random thoughts, photos, videos and locations, we’ve kind of been neglecting the part where it’s all organized and neat, tucked away in a little box.  Like photos used to be.  Our memories, our moments and our lives are now contained in these digital words and images, and we don’t want any of them to be lost.  It’s almost like if they don’t exist, if you can’t lay your hands on them, then part of you doesn’t exist.

This is what I’m feeling as I contemplate the loss of, or at least the opportunity to, have the past two years of my life neatly compartmentalized on Instagram.  I would have really liked to have that option.  And I don’t because I never turned on one switch on my iPhone.

You know how when people ask you what you would take with you if your house was ever on fire, and people always used to say ‘my photo albums?’  Well if the entire Internet was going to shut down tomorrow and I could only take one social network with me, it would be Instagram.  That’s where my memories reside.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

In the meantime, here’s a video showing you all the latest on the update.

Instagram 3.0 – Photo Maps Walkthrough from Instagram on Vimeo.

Kelly Lux

I connect people and share information = I work in social media. Executive Editor of Information Space, Social Communications manager at the iSchool, Co-founder of #CMGRchat on twitter and Adjunct Professor teaching Social Media and Online Community Management.

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  4. Who Are the Contenders to be ‘The Next Instagram’?
  5. Student Sandbox Profiles: Scrapsule – The Scrapbook Time Capsule
  • http://www.facebook.com/j.rodriguez247 Javier Espinoza Rodriguez
     

    Compartmentalizing your memories online is something that Facebook was trying to accomplish with the new Timeline layout. I agree with you that this is a very primal need that we have to tidy all of our online scraps into one organized and aesthetically pleasing layout.

    • http://infospace.ischool.syr.edu Kelly Lux
       

      A primal need indeed. Do you think Timeline is good at that? I'm not a big fan, but maybe over time it will prove itself useful. I guess it all depends how much you share there. Thanks for your comment :)

  • http://twitter.com/JPedde Jenn Pedde
     

    The whole map is VERY iPhoto, and I love that.   I'd love it even more if I could pull all of my geotagged photos from Facebook into my Instagram map.   Also -- sorry about your ungeotagging!!!   I usually don't geotag anything except photos.  Maybe I should...

    • http://infospace.ischool.syr.edu Kelly Lux
       

      I thought that too...SO much like iPhoto and I love that as well. Geotagging is an interesting issue because it really does provide someone who would want to use that information with quite a bit of data about you. So it has its good and bad points, just like almost everyting else on the internet. I actually take way more Instagram photos than I send to Facebook...but for someone like you who has been on FB forever and has tons and tons of photos there, that would really be a nice option. I bet that now they're basically the same company they might just do that. Thanks, Jen!

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  • http://twitter.com/Maestro Maestro
     

    i've been searching all day for any link relating to "lost geotags" and this is where I ended up. Well written post with which I concur wholeheartedly. I was under the impression that I had my location on all along. I could go to some of the 3rd party web clients like gramfeed and zoom in on the map to see the roof of my house! On other pics I had carefully chosen the names of the places I was dining at and prided myself on answering the common question, "where is that from?" with "check out the geotag at the top!" Sadly, when I upgraded the app I seem to have lost all of that data although I followed all of the steps correctly. I'm hoping there's help for me in the future but I doubt it. First world problems indeed.

    • http://infospace.ischool.syr.edu Kelly Lux
       

      I feel your pain, obviously. I did have my foursquare account linked, so I though that the geotagging was enabled. However, I was forever typing in my own locations because I kept getting the message...location disabled (or something to that effect). You would think I would have stopped at some point to investigate. But no, I Instagram in the moment and I never considered what might be coming down the road. I was happy just to be able to flip back and remember all those places and things that I had done. But will I remember where a specific picture was taken 10 years ago? The name of a restaurant may or may not bring back memories of the city where it's located. So now I've enabled geotagging on Instagram...funny that it was litereally the ONLY app on my phone that I had not enabled it. Begin Again. :) Thanks for sharing.

  • http://twitter.com/LHG_OCPL LHG at OCPL
     

    As a librarian/historian/archivist/genealogist I worry about what you touched on at the end, "if the entire Internet was going to shut down tomorrow and ..." We are living in an age of images, and memories and moments that we are all posting electronically with much of it very organized and easy to find - today

    . What happens in 10 years? or 15? 50? when its all changed, or no longer available or gone altogether? How do we preserve this data? Access it if we do preserve it?

    • http://infospace.ischool.syr.edu Kelly Lux
       

      If this is not a problem some startup company is working on, I would be very surprised. The long-term data storage issue is immense...do they just keep sending it to the cloud and does that have infinite capacity? I wish I knew more about how this works, but I think it's a great problem for librarians and archivisits to study. They have the right mindset for preserving and cataloging and, most important, retrieving all of this data. Thanks for your comment!

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  • Simply Country Wood DeSigns
     

    Hello,
    I make wood signs and was wondering if instagram is a good marketing tool for me to add pictres of my signs?

    • http://infospace.ischool.syr.edu Kelly Lux
       

      I don't see why not. It's easy to use and free, so can't hurt to try!

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