three things i love about postagram
I know I’m behind the news cycle on this by about 24 hours, but If you haven’t seen it yet, Postagram is a thing of wonder. It’s a new web and iPhone app that does something simple and ingenious: connects to your Instagram account and helps you send photo postcards to your friends at $0.99 a pop. The postcard is designed to let the recipient pop out the photo, which was clever enough to motivate me to download the app yesterday and send one to my parents of their (oh so cute) granddaughter at the ballpark on opening weekend. Can’t wait to hear how it turned out.
But even without seeing the final product, here are three things I already love about Postagram…
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It’s simple. Simple is always self-evident…but think about what they didn’t build. They didn’t build a general purpose photo printing service. They didn’t connect it to three or four different photo sharing sites. You can’t choose a card or a letter or a print or a poster. In fact, you can’t customize the product at all, save your 140 character message that is printed on your postcard.
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It’s social. Postagram is physical photo sharing. You have a photo, you want to share it with someone. You could invite them to Instagram, of course, or you could email it to them, or you can do something special and send them an actual photo. The act of sharing is designed into the product itself…and ties directly to the nature of its “host,” Instagram. Also, who doesn’t love getting a postcard in the mail?
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It’s physical. This line from Adam King has been rolling around in my head the past week or so: “Our lives are spent trying to pixellate a fractal planet.” There’s so much attention and effort being put into pushing more and more real world experiences on to the screen (or augment them with the screen), it’s refreshing to see something flow in the opposite direction.
Seeing (and using) Postagram sparked that great “of course!” feeling. I’d love to see a lot more services like this: rooted in online, easy to understand, simple to use, impulse price point, creating something useful and emotionally resonant in the world.