Given a few minutes of extra time, I like to jump into a methodical game of app hopscotch on my iPhone, skipping between the square icons looking for something to catch my attention.
E-mail. Twitter. Instapaper. Foursquare. Facebook. The New York Times. After I’ve nibbled on each, I usually end up engrossed in a game, or reading through a few pages of a book on my Kindle app.
Although I download new applications all the time, it’s rare that I add a new one to my hopscotch game. But that all changed a few weeks ago when I discovered Instagram.
As my colleague Claire Cain Miller has chronicled, Instagram is a new social photo-sharing app for the iPhone that allows users to share moments of their day through images taken on their phones. It’s not the only app that does this; PicPlz and Path are similar.
These apps are not simply new photo storage platforms competing with Flickr from Yahoo or the iPhoto service from Apple. Instead, they are trying to create a new way to communicate, with photos, which they hope will allow them to steal a small wedge of the time we are all spending on our smartphones.
Kevin Systrom, a former Google employee who helped found Instagram, explained his company’s goal in a phone interview. He wants, he said, to wrangle “five minutes of your time.”
“In the mobile realm, you have these little snacks during the day where you have five minutes to kill before a meeting or while you’re waiting for the bus,” he said. “We want to engage with you during that time and offer a visually entertaining way to communicate in a bite-size way.”
Mr. Systrom said he didn’t think the app competed directly with other companies. Instead, he said, his “competitors are those other experiences that you want to go and play with for a few minutes.”
Instagram has grown by over 100,000 users each week since it became available nearly six weeks ago.
One reason so many of these visual social networking services are having their debuts now is that the technology used on smartphones finally allows high-quality photos, and fast processing of the photos and special effects on them.
Mitchell Stephens, a professor at New York University noted in his book “The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word,” that new visual technologies will continue to create opportunities for people to communicate visually using photos and videos.
It looks like this new genre of visual storytelling service could quickly become the 140-character version of photography on the Internet.
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