Home
Apps
Apps News
Instagram grabs spotlight for US storm pictures

Instagram grabs spotlight for US storm pictures

By Agence France-Presse | Updated: 31 October 2012 11:11 IST

Click Here to Add Gadgets360 As A Trusted Source

Instagram, the photo-sharing app recently acquired by Facebook, came into the limelight this week as a key source for pictures showing the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

Photos of the storm were popping up on many social networks including Twitter and Google+, but Instagram data showed at least 521,000 photos with the hashtag Sandy.

Another 306,000 were tagged #hurricaneSandy and 39,000 tagged #Frankenstorm.

Facebook Discussion

Explore More...

Jeff Sonderman, a digital media fellow at The Poynter Institute, said that at one point Instagram was posting 10 pictures of the storm per second.

"Natural disasters and tragedies are emerging as a way for social media services to gain respect and legitimacy as world-changing agents as well," he said.

"You can see why a national disaster as told through Instagram could be powerful. In theory, Instagram has Twitter's immediacy, and a broader reach, since it pushes notices out via Twitter, Facebook, Instgram's own network, and email. Clearly images are the best way to tell a story like this, and Instagram's whole raison d'etre is to make people better photographers."

On Twitter, some 147,000 pictures were posted over a 24-hour period tagged Sandy.

Some of the pictures, however, were fakes. A Tumblr page sought to keep track of the obvious and less-obvious bogus photos as "a public service."

One dramatic shot of the New York skyline was "actually a picture from 2011, of a thunderstorm over Manhattan during a tornado alert," said the Tumblr blog author identified as @flashboy.

Facebook completed its acquisition of Instagram in September. The original price was pegged at $1 billion but the final value was less because of the decline in Facebook's share price.

Comments

Get your daily dose of tech news, reviews, and insights, in under 80 characters on Gadgets 360 Turbo. Connect with fellow tech lovers on our Forum. Follow us on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News for instant updates. Catch all the action on our YouTube channel.