The success of Instagram has spawned many mashups between the popular app and other interesting services. For example you can now view geotagged photos as pins on a map through Instamap, and Printstagram will print your favorite Instagram photo on a t-shirt, for you. There are many more mashups that I won’t mention here, but the number of things you can now do with Instagram is astounding.
And now the latest buzz surrounds the arrival of Pinstagram – the ultimate mashup – combining your Instagram photos with the vertically scrolling, grid-like layout of the Pinterest boards, with the fun of pinning and repinning popular photos and your favourite phobologgers photos too of course! But will Pinstagram be successful, or is it just another hyped up app that will fall by the wayside?
One of the reasons why Pinstagram might not become popular with the public is their desire to just keep these two apps separate. It’s possible. Pinterest and Instagram both became very successful by themselves, and while it makes sense that combining features from both may result to an even more popular app, it might just have one too many features. Maybe I don’t want to organize my Instagram photos into boards, maybe I just want to view all of my uploaded photos, popular photos and photos of people I’m following in one never ending vertical scroll on one screen.
Of course it could very well go the other way, Pinstagram now offers a way for frustrated Pinterest fans to upload filtered photos of their lunch to their ‘foods’ board very easily. And Pinstagram offers unlimited sharing capabilities – besides the pinning and repining features, you can also share each Instagram photo on Twitter and Facebook, like it and comment on it, and share through tags. Unlike the mobile app version, the Pinstagram iPad app version makes sharing very easy with the small buttons for sharing appearing on top of each photo when a user hovers over it.
