Boston Restaurant Blog -- May, 2012

Earlier this year, I wrote a couple of blog entries on our joining Pinterest, a social media site that focuses on photography. Well, now Boston's Hidden Restaurants has started an Instagram account, posting a number of pictures onto our page already. So what is the difference between Pinterest and Instagram? There are definitely several, with one of the biggest being that Instagram doesn't really have a website per se, at least not one that can be used all that much to view photos. Instagram is basically a photo sharing site that is restricted to smartphones, and for now, anyway, almost exclusively to iPhones, though an app was recently introduced to some Android users.

The beauty of Instagram is in its simplicity of both use and design; it is extremely easy to post pictures to your page, so much so that you can take a photo of, say, a pizza, do a quick maneuver through Instagram on your phone, and have the picture posted (with a caption/comment) within a minute or two (or within seconds if you're really good). When posting a photo, you can crop it and use any number of filters to fix it up, and by using hashtags (adding a "#" before a word), you can have others find the photo with relative ease. Scrolling through pictures is a breeze because of the simple design which is basically a grid of thumbnails, and your "feed," which shows photos from both you and the people you are following in chronological order, is a very simple top-to-bottom scroll.

So how do we use Instagram? Well, for the most part we use it to post photos of food and restaurants, but because it is a very informal site that isn't directly connected via links to Boston's Hidden Restaurants like Pinterest is, there are also photos of day-to-day things, including everything from sunsets to travel-related pictures to human interest items. Links to a couple of pictures are shown below--you will probably notice that even though these can be seen on your computer, the site is not computer-friendly (there are no links leading out and no real way to GET to these links except via your phone).

Instagram photo of brownie sundae from Emma's in Bridgewater, MA

Instagram photo of the Eagle Brook Saloon in Norfolk, MA

As you can see, you can't really do much with these pictures because Instagram is not really a usable website. The only real way to easily see these and other photos is by using your iPhone (or Droid). To see our photos, our username is "hiddenboston," which can be entered via a search within Instagram on your phone. This will take you to our page where you can see all of the photos that we have posted (as of now, approximately 125).

Hopefully the above information helps decipher Instagram, which can seem really confusing if you are used to social media sites that are, well, websites. If you're on Instagram (or hope to be soon), hopefully we'll see you over there! By the way, the FAQ section of Instagram may help clarify things further; it can be found at http://instagr.am/about/faq/

Posted by MH, Boston's Hidden Restaurants, on May 17, 2012.
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