Instagram Now Adding 130,000 Users Per Week

While I know what you are trying to get at please for a moment think about what you are saying. For most people photos aren't about optical perfection. Photos are a trigger. They are there to trigger a feeling of what a moment was like, to capture what the smells, the sounds and the atmosphere were like at a given point in time. A photo with a new born baby, you and your first girl/boy friend, you an your degree certificate.. these are personal moment with personal feelings. Its about what the moment means to you.

I look at photos I took 10 years ago with my 620x480 camera and I am not upset I didn't take them with a film camera, because the photos still have all the important things to let me relive that moment.

If I take a photo with my iPod, I know it's really low quality to start, so I don't take things I'm going to archive with it. Hopefully others do the same.

But I also take pictures with the camera app first, save them to the camera roll and then pull them into Instagram/picplz if I want to share them. That way, I've got to versions if I want to get all retro with what I'm sharing. Or I can just share the picture as-is.

You can ask Instagram to save the photo unfiltered too.

True, it's not a DSLR picture. But they're making it so much easier for amateurs to edit and share a photo they just took with their phone... versus having to transfer a photo to computer, edit it, upload it, and then share it.

I still agree that they do, for one. I mean, obviously, the market is fickle, and will go where other people are, even if it's not the best tool on the market -- but Flickr's toolset is amazing and insanely capable.

The major difference though, is that Instagram has carved out a niche in the photo sharing market that Flickr doesn't have -- casual, lower-quality photos. IMO, Flickr (and SmugMug, to a large degree) became the place to go if you're a serious, or at least semi-serious photographer. More value is placed on the quality and 'interestingness' of the photo -- the majority of those photos are taken via DSLRs and high-quality gear, not iPhones / Androids.

I don't necessarily see Instagram as competition to Flickr, but I think it's safe to say that if Yahoo keeps Flickr stagnant, we'll see others gaining traction in this space as well.

The post was written by a 3rd party and not Instagram. The last section of the article explains how they managed to get the data:

"Four things allowed us to conduct this analysis: Instagram’s new API, their use of incrementing ID numbers to represent users and photos, the central limit theorem"