My functional description is not inaccurate, nor is yours.

However, the poster I replied to did not substantiate the analogy and comparison of:

  nascent computer science::geometry
  Instagram::pyramids

There's a bunch of fluff in the post, as well as much poorly-articulated navel-gazing.

Also, something I begrudge about the comparison: Ancient geometry had nowhere near the formalism and maturity of study that computer science as a field does. And even if it did? Computer science doesn't seem to be closer than arms-reach to most projects.

Hell, your modern operations and engineering in many cases is just throwing together other people's libraries and fiddling with config files until you have a liquidity event that lets you buy real talent--themselves pretty far removed from the greats of the field of computer science.

About the only thing the pyramids and your socialized twitterscapegrams have in common is the waste of thousands of man-years of productivity and intellect in the pursuit of ego and fleeting fame.

Seriously, folks, let's not treat our industry with such gravitas.

I did not imply that Instagram (or any similar product) is like a pyramid. All I said that if it is a step towards building one, there is no way to know this, yet.

Things that ultimately become useful are most of times never conceived in a straight trajectory. It's a curvy road. Claiming Instagram was a bad turn is just purely naive conjecture by people who delude themselves into thinking they have the magic map.

All we know is, more people than most countries' populations are using this invention to make their lives better. For me at least, Instagram was a massive shift in Camera interaction. I have never captured random moments on daily basis like that before. I only took pictures when I thought I visited some place important, not that great coffee I had in some new city. A good memory to have captured.

You are so full of shit [1]. Tens of millions of people do not share data about their day to day lives. If they did, it would not even be a valuable process. Small groups of friends and family share data about their day to day lives, in a slightly more convenient and slightly less thoughtful/personal way than they did with photo albums, postcards and phone calls 50 years ago.

This is not innovation, it is a small convenience that does not better us in any real way.

[1] Yes, the expletive was entirely necessary.

Yes, in some instances you are right and Instagram replaces a more personal way of sharing a photo. However, in other cases, in empowers and encourages people to share more and in some cases to share when it wasn't before possible.

My baby daughter's grandparents and great grandmother live in another country. Her great grandmother is too old to travel, and so doesn't get to see us as often as we'd all like, so a very simple system that enables her to see regular photos of her great granddaughter is a wonderful thing. Sure, we could snap a polaroid and mail it, or try to educate her more so she could manage Facebook, but in reality these are less likely to happen and more difficult to make happen.

I'm aware in the grand scheme of things Instagram isn't important, and I'm aware it's primary motivator wasn't the situation above. However, I'd suggest being less quick to say it doesn't better us in any way, or even to say it isn't innovation.

Not all innovation needs to change the world.

[1] Was it really?

Progress and innovation are often built upon a series of "small conveniences" that, when added together, make our lives immeasurably better, or enable other innovations which do.

That said, you're clearly too emotional about this to have a reasonable discussion.

You are now talking about the washing machine effect, which is not what you were talking about before. You described a photo sharing site as, "a network of tens of millions of people sharing data about their day-to-day life", which is ridiculous. True, washing your clothes a bit faster is not important by itself, but it is if you can read more books or spend more time with your family. I think it would be a tough case to make that using Instagram instead of emailing zipped photo albums like I did in 1995 allows you to accomplish more with your life.

Just like Facebook? I suppose the stroke of brilliance was constraining it to pictures, but still.

(It's really, really hard not to have disdain for this sort of thing, incidentally.)

All that means is that advertisers now have a new venue to sell into right? Isn't that what all of this is about? I don't see why we should care.

It's not making the market more efficient as nothing but a close to duplicate graph is being created along with pictures that have slightly more value than Facebook pictures, or any other.

Why should we care?