Obsession

As a designer I take a LOT of photographs. I’ve downloaded and tried a lot of photos apps over the past few years. Although there are a ton of great ones out there (Hipstamatic, Diptic, ShakeItPhoto to name a few), I became obsessed with Instagram and have Facebook and tweeted my love for the app several times.

Instagram makes taking photos and sharing them extremely easy on the most social platforms — Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, Posterous and even good ol’ email. Just like Twitter and Facebook, you can choose to keep your Instagram account open for the world to see or keep it locked for privacy.

I love the app so much that in April I co-curated a show in our Designbox gallery called “Greetings from Raleigh” which featured professional shots of Raleigh and tons of Instagram photos from local Raleighites.

There are a lot of cool products that are being made with Instagram’s API. Recently, I found a service called Postagram that prints (and ships!) postcards of your Instagram photos from the web or your iPhone (I am seriously considering using Postagram postcards for my Christmas cards this year). I placed an order and when my postcard arrived, it was high-quality, printed on thick, glossy paper and had perforated edges around the photo so the person that receives the postcard can pop out the 3 x 3 inch photo and have it as a keepsake.

Another VERY cool thing I stumbled upon this week is a screensaver called ‘Screenstagram‘ (developed by Barbarian Group). It displays your photos, your friends photos and photos from the Instagram “popular feed” (a great way to find new people to follow!).

I’ll keep posting new and exciting Instagram services when I find them. In the meantime, check out the app, the postcards and the screensaver so you can obsess about Instagram as much as I do. Please let me know if you find other Instagram products by leaving a comment. Instagram-on, friends!

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