[danso]

I can't claim to have foreseen Instagram's success...but to me, it's one of the best and prominent examples of how removing friction can be a completely new product...well, when you think about it, even Facebook itself became hugely successful by reducing the friction of getting to know people and keeping tabs on old friends.

But Instagram's value proposition is subtler than Facebook's...I remember that Hipstamatic and its filters was all the rage among my amateur cameraphotographer friends...it was so dominant that Pulitzer Prize-winner Damon Winter of the New York Times used it in his war photography [1].

But IIRC, Hipstamatic did not at all care about the concept of social networking...although perhaps what made it lose to Instagram was the fact that it cost money. I was very slow to take up Instagram because I keep an active Flickr (pro/paid) account...but now I see that Instagram's main value is not attractive photos, but its minimalist, sleek social features. The appeal of phone photography in general is that it constrains the amount of thinking/editing you can do...Instagram's filters ease the tradeoff of quality/ease and its networking features reduce even further the friction of showing the world what you just saw. And you have few options to elaborate on the photo, other than a caption and some tagging...I still like using Facebook, but Instagram works very well on its own because it's not just a filtered visual view, but its constraints limit the kind of things that piss people off about Facebook...for example, it's considerably more difficult to get into political arguments on Instagram.

[1] http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-t...