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Introducing Instagram Direct

blog.instagram.com

51–60 of 104 posts

Re: Introducing Instagram Direct

#51
post #29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See that's what I'm saying. Someone texts you a photo, it doesn't go into your photo list. It stays in your text convo. I'm all for data management and removing clutter, but I can think of 500 items to clear out before I consider private photo messages from my closest friends.

I don't know what kind of smartphone you are using but every photo someone texts me ends up in my Android gallery.

I didn't know Android did that. If you're texting tons of photos I can see it getting out of control

Re: Introducing Instagram Direct

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Versus Photostream!!!!! This is almost identical to Photostream which really is an under-appreciated iPhone product.

Interesting, I've not heard of this. How do I get started with this? (I'm using Android).

Well that's the downside. But honestly I'm not going to sympathize very much because over 80% of my friends have iPhones and I am already biased to sending messages to them because iMessage and Photostream are such good products.

On another point unrelated to this thread Apple and Google really should work together to develop a single messaging and sharing API hosted from either of their clouds.

Re: Introducing Instagram Direct

#54
post #44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what kind of smartphone you are using but every photo someone texts me ends up in my Android gallery.

iOS doesn't save images people send you automatically. It will save pictures you send to others on your Camera Roll though.

WhatsApp on iOS does that. Every Picture I receive is automatically saved.

Re: Introducing Instagram Direct

#55
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MMS is horrendous and the picture quality is poor, plus you can't view it off of one's mobile.

Huh? MMS itself is completely irrelevant to the quality of the photo you send over it. If your phone's camera is good, the photo quality will be good also.

I wouldn't say it's completely irrelevant -- MMSes are heavily compressed by every phone OS I've ever used. Wikipedia lists a "recommended limit" of 300 kB[1], and Verizon's developer site lists a hard limit of 1.2 MB[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

[2]: http://developer.verizon.com/content/vdc/en/verizon-tools-ap...

Re: Introducing Instagram Direct

#56
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS doesn't save images people send you automatically. It will save pictures you send to others on your Camera Roll though.

WhatsApp on iOS does that. Every Picture I receive is automatically saved.

You can simply turn this off in the settings ("Save Incoming Media": OFF).

Re: Introducing Instagram Direct

#57
post #11

I think snapchat's timeout feature is a novelty that attracted users, but people ultimately just want to send private messages to their friends. Not everything needs to be broadcasted, and that's part of the OG instagram userbase - people that wanted an alternative to the facebook feed. What's wrong with texting though? My friends and I have been texting and group texting images and short video for years. Why do peop…

Snapchat's timeout feature is not just a novelty, is it allowing for a whole different type of digital communication. The sender does not have to worry about where their image might show up. It frees people to take goofy photos and act more naturally (as opposed to all the posed, staged shots on Instagram and Facebook).

Re: Introducing Instagram Direct

#58
post #11

I think snapchat's timeout feature is a novelty that attracted users, but people ultimately just want to send private messages to their friends. Not everything needs to be broadcasted, and that's part of the OG instagram userbase - people that wanted an alternative to the facebook feed. What's wrong with texting though? My friends and I have been texting and group texting images and short video for years. Why do peop…

Snapchat's timeout feature is not just a novelty, is it allowing for a whole different type of digital communication. The sender does not have to worry about where their image might show up. It frees people to take goofy photos and act more naturally (as opposed to all the posed, staged shots on Instagram and Facebook).

I don't know why this misconception keeps getting propogated. If the motivation to save pictures is there then a person will save the pictures. I have to believe it's the fad. I mean poke had this same feature yet it never took off

Re: Introducing Instagram Direct

#59
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MMS is horrendous and the picture quality is poor, plus you can't view it off of one's mobile.

Huh? MMS itself is completely irrelevant to the quality of the photo you send over it. If your phone's camera is good, the photo quality will be good also.

According to Wikipedia[1], "300 kB is the current recommended size used by networks due to some limitations on the WAP gateway side". While that is listed as "Citation Needed", other links from the the same search query lists sizes varying from 600KB to 1.2MB. A quick look at the files sizes at the images I've taken shows that most of my images are over 1000KB. So, there is some kind of re-sizing that needs to occur over SMS. Instagram and other similar services don't necessarily require such re-sizing, or possibly get around it by having you crop the image yourself, so the relative quality of the remaining portion remains higher quality as opposed to shrinking the entire image to fit the size restrictions.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service#Ch...

Re: Introducing Instagram Direct

#60

Does anybody know if they're planning on making this available via their third party API? I've checked the current API docs [1] as well as the Google Group [2] and the StackOverflow Posts [3]. There's nothing mentioning it yet. This would be an awesome feature to have available in third party apps, so that one could have it in other chat clients apart from the official iPhone app. Adium is one example, but there're p…

I'm pretty sure they won't make it available. They still don't allow uploading images to their service using an API, so I doubt they will allow to send messages.

After the Twitter example, APIs are not attractive to these kind of startups. If you give full capabilities to 3rd party developers, they're going to create clients for other systems and the startup will lose control over its content and how it's shown to users (ads).

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