Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos

I'm so addicted to Instagram! Here are a few photos.

NissyBunique

 NissyBunique

Instagram is yet another iPhone photo-finessing app, but it’s one that you’ll keep coming back to instead of playing for five minutes and then forgetting about it. Wired.com editor Micheal Calore’s says it’s “like a mashup of Hipstamatic and Tumblr.”

The app combines a lot of pretty, Lomo-like filters to jazz up your crappy smartphone shots, but the secret sauce is the social aspect, which lets you share the results with Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Foursquare and yes, Tumblr. But that’s not all. You also share your pictures with the Instagram network itself.

I took the free application for a spin on my iPod Touch (you can also share pictures from your saved film roll). It comes on like a kind of reverse Instapaper, only for photos instead of text. Whereas you can dump any article you like, from anywhere, into Instapaper to read later, with Instagram you can take your picture and send it everywhere. That makes it the default place you go to share photos.

Once you have signed up, you can also follow friends, just like you’d follow them on any social network. Best of all, the app talks to the Foursquare API, so when you send a photo from the bar you’re in, the app will geotag it and then Foursquare will use that info to add a place-name to your shot.

The app itself is dead easy to use, and you are walked through the initial step upon first launch. You could just use it to process and upload your snaps – adding a filter is fast and as easy as clicking on a button – but you can also browse your friends’ picture, leave comments or just explore random images from the Instagram network. You can import friends from Facebook and Twitter, as well as your iPhone’s contact list, but right now I don’t have any contacts also using the service. This is likely to improve over the next few days as all the nerds I know try it out.

Calore, the Webmonkey software supremo for Wired.com, thinks the Instagram is going to be a “Big Deal.” I was skeptical at first – who needs another photo-sharing app? – but after trying it I see just what he means. In fact, I’ll come up with another simile to describe it. Instagram could be like a Twitter for your photos.

Instagram [iTunes]

http://www.wired.com