Oh how history repeats itself in such a delicious way. The Polaroid camera was removed from the market by a change in technology and other companies embracing it to the hilt–pushing the Polaroid camera and company into oblivion. Now, the website Instagram, whose symbol is oft seen as the Polaroid camera is not being pushed into oblivion by another company that is willing to push the technology to the hilt.
The digital age
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Thanks to digital technology, your pictures may be stretched, filtered, snipped and air brushed to be a completely different animal from what it started out at. Sites such as Instagram, Flickr, and Pinterest have made a lot of friends and gained many user accounts because of digital photography.
The great thing about Instagram
What they allow you to do is to take a photo on your smart phone, alter it with a filter or a little editing, and then post it onto the Instagram website. Instagram is a social media site, so people can comment on the work of others, people can show off pictures to their friends, and people can get into a community discussion or event if they wish. The user’s level of involvement is just as possible with Instagram as it is with FaceBook, or any other social media site.
Twitter thought it saw a puddy cat
Twitter is very aware of this new trend of photo taking and sharing. The effect that the photo albums on Facebook (the world’s largest social media site) have had has been phenomenal. There are millions and millions of gigabytes of data on Facebook that are dedicated to photos alone! Now with the increasing popularity of image-based sites it seems that Twitters attention has been sparked. They are a popular site but they are all about words, and it seems that words are going out of fashion to be replaced with images. Twitter has no intention of going the same way as MySpace, Alta Vista or Lycos.
So what did Twitter do?
They launched a press release, which indicates that they are going to start moving into the realm of images. If people wish to add images to their Twitter profiles and blogs–they can use Instagram and take a picture. They can save this picture and upload it to Twitter if they wish. Instagram does not mind this because it is driving a lot of traffic towards their site. Now however, Twitter has announced that they will cut out the middleman.
Cutting out the middle man
There is a change coming to the Twitter Smartphone app, which will allow people to apply filters and affects to their pictures without the need for them to use Instagram. This means that people will be less reliant upon Instagram.
Twitter is not stopping there
It seems that this move is only stage one, as many sources are suggesting that Twitter are going to continue improving the app until people are able to edit and upload images directly with their app. This will completely remove the need for Instagram.
Videos too
One would assume that if this change goes well, that they will inevitably change their video uploading protocols, so that users do not need upload videos via Vimeo or YouTube.
What does Facebook have to do with this?
Facebook have just bought Instagram for seven hundred and fifteen million dollars. This puts part of the second-biggest social-media-sites function into the hands of the biggest social-media website. This is most likely what has prompted this move to change the Twitter app so that people can upload their own photos. The filter changes will happen over the coming months. The progress of the Twitter upload and edit function is currently unknown by those outside of Twitters main workings. Author bio: Korah Morrison is a specialist of context advertising, social marketing and copywriter on essay writing service EssayWritingServices.com. She writes articles on various topics that deal with internet marketing, web design, branding and business promotion in the internet.
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