On a smaller scale, Instagram is a great way to share pictures from your cellphone with friends. Looking at it from a larger scale, Instagram offers the ability for people to share their photos worldwide and ‘This Is Now’ is really taking advantage of the global phenomenon that Instagram has become. With the large amount of photos uploaded everyday, more than 5 million as of April, it’s a great opportunity for enterprising developers.
‘This Is Now’ uses the Instagram API to display real-time streams of public photos taken in five cities worldwide:
- New York, United States
- London, United Kingdom
- Sydney Australia
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Tokyo, Japan
When you go to the ‘This Is Now’ website, you’ll see five boxes to choose from, one for each country, and the time and date of each specific country. In choosing a country, a new window opens with a stream of Instagram photos that are constantly shifting as new ones are added. An information link tells you how many pictures have been uploaded for each country, which at time of writing was 77,822 in Sao Paulo, and how many people have visited the country’s photo stream, which was 23,491 in Sao Paulo.
According to the site, people normally spend an average of 3 minutes and 21 seconds watching the stream before moving on to do something else.
‘This Is Now’ is such a great idea to really use the popularity of Instagram and the millions of photos that users upload. It’s a great way to get to know countries we’ve never been to.
Source: This Is Now via The Verge
Image Credit: LaughingSquid
