Instagram has been pretty easy to set up and to use. As it turned out, I know 22 people on Instagram, although it looks like only three of them use it with any regularity. This may be another one of the social media sites that people sign up for out of curiosity and then never get into the habit of using. But this gave me a good start for people to follow, and a few of the 22 have even followed me back. Oh, my soaring popularity!
What little I knew of Instagram before signing up had left me wondering what the point was. It's hard for me not to think of it as visual Twitter—that is, if you created Twitter, but you had people post a photo instead of a sentence or two, you'd have Instagram. And hey, there are a lot of people out there who are just as visual as they are verbal, or more so, and maybe that was all there was to it. So I hadn't figured I needed to join, because I like Twitter, and the few times I've wanted to post pictures, it's been easy to do. It's not as easy to post photos to Facebook, but it's not horrendously complicated either. But yeah, I can see now that it's just that much easier to do so through Instagram: take the photo, edit it, add captions and commentary, and direct it to Twitter, Facebook, and/or other destinations, all from within the Instagram app.
I'm happy to say that Instagram has motivated me to use my phone camera more. I still plan to take most of the pictures for my blogs with my digital camera, because I want them to be higher quality, but Instagram encourages quick pics to be shared on impulse with friends, which is perfect for the phone camera. And since I finally have a phone camera that can take decent pictures without a lot of fuss, using Instagram is more feasible than it was in the past. So I'm liking it much more than I thought I would, and I'm leaning towards continuing to use it after I've finished this post. But I'm still a bit concerned about that overlap. How many more general social media networks can the world support, anyway? Perhaps Instagram is different enough from Facebook and Twitter by dint of its photos-first focus to survive and thrive. We'll see.
Professionally, this is another app/service I can't see much use for. Everything I've read says that currently Instagram is hot with teenagers and college students, an age range not known for using law libraries. Indeed, a libraries-and-social-media webinar I attended last year stated bluntly that if teenagers weren't a major patron group for your library, don't bother getting your library on Instagram. Of course, if Instagram is one of the social media networks that endures, its users will age. Some of them will eventually become first law students, then lawyers, and then maybe we'll use it to reach them then [insert evil cackle here].
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