Instagram Co-Founder Says the Service Needs “To Be A Big Data Company”

Instagram is playing a bigger and bigger part in helping the public see and understand important events. At the GigaOM RoadMap conference held this past Monday, co-founder Kevin Systrom shared his vision of how Instagram needs to become a “big data company”. TechCrunch writes,

Systrom says Instagram’s focus is on “making meaning of all the data coming in, and improving the experience of curating.” For example, he said that there were only 85,000 #SuperBowl Instagrams, compared to the 800,000 #SandyGram. People can’t consume 800,000 photos, but they still want to pull valuable information from them.

He gave an example of how Instagram might one day be able to help “if you’re in New York and want to know what gas stations have gas.” That means both photo recognition, but also natural-language processing. Systrom also hinted at “photo location trends” that show where the most Instagrams are currently being taken.

The element of real-time photo sharing will allow Instagram to do things with photos that most photo-sharing services can’t. It’ll be interesting to see what “big data techniques” the company comes up with for making sense of its massive stream of live imagery.

800K #Sandy-grams Showed Systrom Instagram Is “Going To Need To Be A Big Data Company” [TechCrunch]

P.S. The service also saw 2.1x its normal level of traffic during the election this past Tuesday.

Image credit: Insanity at gas station. So glad I’m a cyclist!!! by Kristine Paulus