(Host)
Commentator Rich Nadworny is an expert in new media and digital
marketing. And he says that if a picture is a poem without words, then
the Internet is becoming very poetic.
(Nadworny) Recently two new
social media sites, Pinterest and Instagram have become the fastest
growing social networks yet. Both have one thing in common: people use
them to share pictures rather than text. And this may prove to be a
tipping point in our digital communications bringing us back to a much
more fundamental pattern in human sharing.
Pinterest is a Web
site where people can share pictures they find on the Internet. If you
find a picture you like, or find interesting, you "pin" it. Your
Pinterest page or album becomes a visual mosaic of colors, shapes and
ideas. It’s far more interesting to look at than most pages online,
which is probably why it’s grown so fast.
According to recent
data, it took Pinterest only 9 months to go from 50,000 site visitors to
17 million site visitors. That’s the fastest growth ever. Facebook took
16 months to reach the same level while Twitter took 22 months. In fact
Pinterest is now the third largest social media site in the U.S.
And
while most of the other social media sites saw male tech geeks as their
pioneering members, Pinterest has far more women using its site than
men. Women on Pinterest are more likely to come from the mid-west than
the coasts, another key difference. It’s become a perfect place to share
pictures of crafts, fashion and interior design.
Instagram, on
the other hand, is a mobile app that lets you share pictures you take
yourself, with your smart phone. It’s now the largest mobile social
network around. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, when you follow someone on
Instagram, you see their stream in pictures, rather than text. I think
it may be the most personal and intimate real-time social network I’ve
seen. Even if there is an overabundance of pictures of meals and lattes
One
of the reasons something like Instagram resonates has to do with the
vast improvement in smart phone cameras. With 8-megapixel resolution,
these phones are far better than the digital cameras we bought only a
few years ago. The pictures are better and the ability of some of these
photographers is astounding.
The Internet has primarily been a
text-based medium, from its humble beginnings with HTML coding right up
through Twitter’s 140 characters. Sure we’ve added pictures and video,
but it’s still mostly text. Pinterest and Instagram’s popularity could
imply a tipping point for the Web to become a true visual medium.
Certainly Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook team think so, since they
just bought the 10-person Instagram for a whopping $1B!
In a way
this shift could mark a return for us humans to something much more
basic and intrinsic. We started sharing information with others through
drawings on cave walls. Perhaps technology is allowing us to come full
circle. While all of these pictures aren’t worth 1,000 words, most are
worth more than 140 characters.