Instapost

I own neither an iPod nor an Android—but I have a couple of little handheld cameras and the Picasa software on my PC. Impossession (to coin a word) of these newest devices made it impossible for me to test the great innovation that has catapulted Instagram in two years from a raw startup without money to a $1 billion corporation which will be soon be the property of Facebook. The hoopla made me curious. What innovation has caused this astonishing growth? Was it the company’s ability to hold down total employment to 13? Thirteen is a good number!

The simple answer is that social media represents our only evidently growing industry, and the founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (based on photos they’re in their twenties) wrote software for the little hand-held devices capable of editing photos, on the phones themselves, and publishing them on social networks, not least Instagram’s own. The technology consists of sixteen filters that manipulate a snapshot. The filters have fetching names like Amaro, Hudson, Xpro-II, Inkwell (for black-and-white), Hefe, Nashville, and 1977 along with others. That last one, presumably, to make pictures look antique. The innovation here lies in automating the editing function. You can have any look, dear users, so long as it’s one of those sixteen.

Making their storage systems work rapidly—and creating a system that will scale massively and rapidly—shows me that Systrom and Krieger know their stuff.  They’re using very sophisticated database management techniques that probably took much longer to learn than pixel manipulation. It isn’t innovative because the techniques they deploy were pioneered by Google quite some time ago.

Reasonable photo editors perform  the functions of those filters well—albeit it takes more time and thought. Picasa’s software is among them—also free. To give some sense of what I’m talking about, here is a before-and-after of an old winter outdoor shot of mine.

Now the original is nice enough—but if you want to make it look more edgy, contradictory—thus as if night were just around the corner, the modified image is a “filtered” version.

The miracle of economic growth that Instagram represents appears, therefore, to rest entirely on the miniaturization of computers and the irresistible attraction advertisers feel when viewing large numbers of people at play. 

Social Networks

What do Lady Gaga (10,999,135), Justin Bieber (10,436,368), Barack Obama (8,687,105), Britney Spears (8,234,189), and Kim Kardashian (7,915,103) have in common? Big numbers, for one thing. The numbers I reproduce are the followers they have on Twitter according to twittercounter.com (here). They are, in the order shown, the five most popular tweeters in the world.

Barack Obama stands out in two ways. He is not an entertainer, and he is the only person in the list who is over 31 years of age. For those fading few like me who did not recognize but perhaps two names on the list, Lady Gaga is Stefani Germanatta, a pop singer, aged 25; Justin Bieber is a 17-year-old Canadian singer; Britney Spear, 30, is a recording artist and entertainer, and Kim Kardashian, 31, is described by Wikipedia as a “personality” and a “socialite.”

The times are changing. What we are pleased to call “communications” is morphing into something very strange, never before seen—but, I hasten to add, so were newspapers when they first appeared in the wake of mechanized printing in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the social networks, which are now coming to dominance, are the consequence of electronic communications media. Growth rates are astonishing. Here is a graphic, built from data on this Facebook site, of three of them:

The big name (for now) is Facebook. The hot new property is Twitter. It more than doubled between last year and this. Twitter had 100 members (that’s one hundred, not a typo) in March 2006. LinkedIn, a business net-working site, has recently gone public and is now, suddenly, cluttering up my e-mail inbox.

It’s well to remember that “networking” actually pre-dates the Internet. The concept surfaced in the 1960s and was well established as a concept, indeed even as a quasi-institutional phenomenon, by the 1970s—long before the Internet was commercialized in 1995. You got ahead, it was said, by cultivating a network of well-placed acquaintances—courting them, as it were, consciously, with your own career in mind. I clearly remember once attending a seminar during the 1973-1975 recession; I was looking for consulting clients at the time, a tough time economically; the seminar much disappointed me. It had been too cleverly named. Everybody at the meeting was also looking for clients too— and not a client in sight! LinkedIn, not surprisingly, was the first of these social networks, established in December of 2002. Facebook began in February 2004, and Twitter appeared officially in July of 2006.

The growth in networks is matched by explosive growth in mobile devices. In the third quarter of 2010 alone, 417 million mobile phones were sold worldwide. And in that same time period, another 80.5 million smartphones were purchased. I have this from Marketsize entries reachable here. Instant availability of linkage to a global com-system, with or without wire, is matched by services that link people to each other—and to the personalities they wish to know all about, up to the minute, as it were.

Over against this we have a decline in the by now “traditional” newspaper establishment. In 2010 the top 100 newspapers in the United States had a daily circulation of a mere 21.9 million. Per Reuters, 379 papers had a daily circulation of 30.4 million in 2009, having declined 4.6 percent from 2008. As circulation drops and newspapers first thin out and then disappear, our carbon footprint is also presumably shrinking. Or so it would seem on the surface. The truth is that we can’t know for sure. Is the energy we save by producing less newsprint now consumed in making millions of electronic devices so that our population can keep in touch with events, like Now, like in Real Time, while On the Go?