Instagram Quickly Passes 1 Million Users

Instagram Popular PagePhotos collected from Instagram’s Popular page

Instagram, a social photo-sharing company that opened its shutters to iPhone owners just two months ago, announced Tuesday that it passed a milestone of one million registered users.

The company began offering its simple photo service in mid-October that allows people to share images from a mobile phone and then add unique and fun filters. Since then, Instagram has quickly become the talk of the tech community as people have flocked to the service even with stiff competition from a number of well-financed competitors, including PicPlz, Flickr and Path.

In a company blog post, Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, explained his amazement with the growth of the service, pointing out that Instagram started with only 80 users and an “audacious goal” to let people share media in an open community.

“We’ve just been amazed at the growth of the service,” Mr. Systrom said in a phone interview. “My partner and I had a bet the first day about how many downloads we would get and I was off by an order magnitude.”

According to Mr. Systrom, Instagram users are “collectively uploading approximately three photos a second and tens of millions of photos have been shared on the service.”

Users are collectively uploading approximately three photos a second.

Many have questioned why Instagram has gained an edge over a number of its social network competitors and hundreds of camera filter apps. The answer very likely lies in Instagram’s ease of use and balance of simplicity, speed and artistic filters. Instagram also makes it simple to send photos to other social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.

Over the last two months I’ve watched friends become slightly obsessed with Instagram. I have too. We constantly check to see new photos from friends and engage in chatty conversations with strangers around the globe about their images.

“I think images are an incredibly accessible medium, you don’t have to speak English to be able to enjoy photos from around the world,” said Mr. Systrom, when asked about the obsessive nature of Instagram’s users. “We’re visual beings and we love being stimulated visually.”

Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired, recently noted that Instagram offers a lens to help people look at the world a little differently, presenting the ability to share the mundane objects and moments in life through artistic filters.

But whatever the reason, I’m sure those who use Instagram can agree with something Mr. Thompson noted in his blog post: “I was instantly, and horribly, hooked.”