Instagram: Insta-want These Features… Insta-ntly

Dear Instagram, I miss things…

The moment I downloaded and first tried Instagram was the moment I fell in love with it. Their ‘Keep it simple’ policy made me, a fresh iPhone user at the time, understand what to do in about three minutes. Their  ‘put hipster filters in’ policy made me, a non-photographer, an artsy person in a moment.

I ended up on the popular page very soon and started collecting a lot of  followers. But I was also discovering a lot of creative and interesting people. In time, I just couldn’t remember the nicknames of those people I’ve followed and liked more than some other people who also made me click “follow” because they had “something” I liked in their stream.

So, I wanted to somehow bookmark my favourite Instagram people. But, how?

Instagram doesn’t offer us to create a list of your top Instagram people. OK, we can view “Photos you’ve liked” and we  can search friends by their names and usernames or by tags. But that is just not enough.

Why:

• A person who follows only 100 people cannot remember everything about them, and you can imagine what’s the problem with someone following 1000 people..
• Several interesting Instagram users just don’t post in the same time while you’re using the app or use it occasionally, so you never see their posts again. If only we could have bookmarked their profile when we saw “that pic” the very first time.

And please, Kevin and the rest of the crew, if you are thinking about adding this option, please add “Bookmark this photo” ,too, so that we don’t have to screenshot every single interesting photo we see on Instagram just to be sure we won’t forget who posted it.

Insta-want

Nicknames and tags suggestions:

• When typing somebody’s name, you don’t get suggestions after entering 2-3 letters. You have to guess correctly the full (nick)name or the person just won’t be found.
• The same thing with #tags.

Please, don’t make us type the full length of somebody’s long nickname. We hate that, and we hate when we got it wrong. I have a long nickname, and I’m sure a lot of people just give up typing it… But I won’t change it, because it’s my nickname on other services and I’d like to keep my “social identity.”

Private photos?

Most of us don’t want to go private with our full profiles because the whole point of Instagram is sharing. But sometimes, we just can’t resist posting some pics that maybe are not for broader audience. Yes, it’s our mistake and we are fully aware of that. But it would be so much easier if we could mark a photo as “private”, so that we can see it, have it online or share it with 2-10 people, and not the whole world.

Private messages?

Please, do introduce them. We  want to make contact with other people, but it is a little bit strange to write your email address or any other more personal data in the comment box, because we don’t want other to see or use it. We might be attention whores when posting those photos, but we are also very sensitive about our email address. We want to give it to some people, not to all people.

Bla, bla, bla…

Some people will comment that these suggestions are contrary to the simplicity of Instagram we all love. But, those who use Instagram from their early launch, know that this kind of app now has gone through various updates and changes. We didn’t even have the “mention user” option in the comment box before and it turned out to be a very helpful and popular thing.

In the beginning, you didn’t know when you ended up on the popular page if you somehow missed to see a pop-up notification or if other users didn’t congratulate you on that, but now you have it listed under “News”…

And there was no rotation, no choosing frames, new filters…So, you see, there have been changes. Changes we liked immediately.

So, dear Instagram, please change more. I don’t want to use Instagallery any more.  They have Favourites sets and tags suggestions and you can have it, too.

Sincerely yours,

NotAnotherBarbie