¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Note: this is a brief article which exposes my opinion about a free web service.

For a long time I refrained myself from creating an Instagram account for some reasons. Those reasons are not much different for the delayed birth of my Facebook profile. Let’s talk a little about them and discuss if they were or not valid:

A. Too mainstream: yeah, Instagram is pop. One of the top downloads of smartphones app stores nowadays. So what, you just stop using a service just because it is mainstream, and period? No, no, no. But…for every mainstream service, caution is needed.

A.1 Privacy: Most accounts from people I currently follow on Instagram are public by default (neverthless, this is the default setting of Instagram). Not cool, dude, not cool. This is a short essay and you probably know what I would talk here, so let’s be brief : most of those people are either not concerned or don’t know what the problem of this deliberate practice might cause them a day.

A.2 Did you read its terms of service? Photos are stored forever in there (in principle), even after you delete them. And what one person – for example, either a complete stranger or the company behind Instagram itself – could to with them? So many things. The most common underrated example is: selling them – plus information associated with them – to other companies, so they can (for example) better target ads to you. This is not simply a matter of ads: it also creates a bigger and bigger bubblein which you get stuck.

I’m just posting random photos in there, so I don’t care. But hey, look at other people profiles. They post photos about themselves all the time. $$$$oooooo many data…one more thing, remember: Instagram was created exactly for this purpose: you are encouraged to use it just from your phone (not from the web), and there is a big “shoot photo” button. While you can upload photos to it manually (instead of shooting and submitting them there directly), this is not encouraged by design. So hey, a big database of public photos of Bob and Alice, available 24/7.

Remember: when the service is free, YOU are the product (author needed).

So, is maintreamness a problem? That depends on you.

**B.**A social network represents what most of its users make from it. And…what most (I repeat: most) users use Instagram for? For bragging. That’s it. You might try to argue it is different, but it is not. One could say this is human nature, but if it is, then I find it pretty sad. I always had this suspicion, but only after creating an Instagram account I could confirm it. So what? Pretty simple: I’ll just delete the app from my smartphone. I won’t delete my account because I may need it in the future (don’t forget: people post data; data might become valuable anytime later on). However, if you find bragging cool (I’m not judging, just stating that I don’t like this), then Instagram is probably the perfect social network for you. It is even better than Facebook (actually, it supersedes it; you can automatically make every new photo of yours appear on Facebook automatically, yay!) in this sense.

C. Design: despite the previous item, I have to say something: I appreciate the engineering and the design of the service. Engineering? Well, I previously said the service is consumed by many people, millions of them, and yet it has a very good response time. Design? Yeah, the app and the service are very well written and conceived. UX is amazing, the app is pretty much intuitive and easy for newcomers to learn it. And it follows the Unix philosophy as a bonus: “do one thing and do it well” ==> photo sharing. ATM I don’t know about the team, but I would probably be very happy if I worked in a successful service and ecosystem like it.

Conclusion : of course I generalized a few things¹, but I believe they are not far from the truth. This was a brief overview about Instagram, there are no right or wrong conclusions: you think what you want and use it as you wish. Have a nice day.