The meaning of photos in today's world
Is a photo worth a thousand words? Can a photo still change the world, etch its meaning in our minds forever? As part of SnapCast's idea validation research, we interviewed 20 photo sharers, surveyed over 50 people and did passive "ethnographic" observation on photo sharing behavior on Instagram, Flickr and Facebook over a period of 4 weeks. Here are some of our findings and interesting implications for photo/image apps such as Canvas and Color:
Photos are ephemeral and no longer "sticky"
Photos used to be a thing that lasts forever. A shared photo is now more similar to a status update or a tweet. It's meaning and importance are fleeting, it lasts only for a moment and then perishes among the firehose of other information in our social stream. Very few actually search for past photos or even bother to organize them aside from the default organization offered by software.
The implications? Because our attention span on photos are so short, there is no reason to spend a lot of time or effort on them. What's the point of spending hours editing your photos, putting in funny captions or creating interesting collages when people will only look at them for a few seconds, if at all?
This is a problem Canvas will have to surmount. How can Canvas engage users to invest their time and effort when their creations are meant to be adapted by others in a moment?
Photos are all about "me" - vanity is a very compelling motivation
People are interested in photos of themselves, their friends, their community or their interests. People post photos that make them look good. People post photos of themselves doing interesting things or visiting interesting places. They take artistic or ironic photos that cry, look how cool I am. It's not surprising that the #1 reason people mentioned as their reason for using Instagram was because it made their photos look better. Instagram's killer feature was the "auto-tune" filters for photos.
Photo apps must have significant utility by itself for continuos usage
Despite all the hype about "social" apps , the typical user uses photo apps mainly for its utility, at least initially, before getting pulled into the social aspects and becoming part of a community. The utility of the app comes first because it requires continuous engagement over a period of time before one accrues benefits from the "social" aspects of a new community. Thus, a photo app that requires a large user base before it is useful will not succeed.
Photo communities are real and centered around interests, and they take time to build
A new user in a photo sharing network starts out with a few friends. As time goes by, the user builds a community of friends or followers, usually around people who share similar interest or taste in photos. They start commenting on other people's photos, and build relationships with other users. This process takes time and requires commitment. Hence, I don't believe in the usefulness of "elastic" networks ala Color where users have not invested time/effort.
Most people use different networks to share different types of photos.
This is quite obvious- Facebook is mostly for personal photos, Instagram is more for artistic or professional photos, Flickr is for professional photos (but only for people 30 and above. Flickr is an aging photo network, but that is another story). What does this mean? There will be a place for niche photo social networks. This is one of our key learnings, and we are now working on Petstagram - photo community for pet owners.
I will save the rest for the next post. Send me a tweet at @wooyi if you're interested in participating in Petstagram or want to discuss my thoughts there.
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