(I wish this picture had an old-timey sepia filter on it.)
I see Instagram has finally discovered this whole "World Wide Web" thing. Welcome to The Nineties, guys!
Maybe someday we can welcome them to the Twenty-First Century when they finally discover RSS.
At that point, their service might be rise above "utterly irrelevant and undiscoverable from the world in which I live."
But hey, that whole "walled garden" approach worked out pretty well for industry titans like Compuserve and AOL! I hear they have exclusive content from Soundgarden!
Did you see the near-riot when they dared open up their system to those filthy Android users? I hear that their users left in droves*!
*The value of a drove is yet unknown, but theorized to be somewhere in the double digits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#Facebook_ownership
Yes, I know. I'm sure it was worth it at any price.
1994 called, they want their Corel PhotoPoint filters back.
Yeah, I'm in my 40's but I fail to see the draw of making modern pictures look like they did before most Instagram users were born. Nostalgia for an era they didn't live in? I guess that's a thing. (You don't like the old tyme bikes? .)
We'll all still be talking about Instagram by the end of next summer. Not.
May I introduce you to Steampunk?
I have an easier time understanding a mashup of things that didn't actually exist previously, rather than using modern technology to make something that's better, crappier in a historically accurate way.
Like those people with antennas for their TVs. Ha ha. Idiots.
You know the bitrate on broadcast ATSC is generally a bit higher than when crappified to fit into a cable network's idea of channel width, right?
Yep. That's one reason I don't have cable. Or satellite. I decided to leave the 90's behind and stream TV over this new-fangled inter-global-hyper-net thingy.
Analog distortion and degradation is more visually pleasing than digital degradation. Better to add lots of softness to an image and reduce the color palette because it will hide the jpeg artifacts better. Also our brains have been trained to associate certain types of degradation with certain time periods, and therefore with certain levels of nostalgia. What we've proved is that "nostalgia" is literally a bit in our brain that we can flip on demand.
Sepia (click through to get animated version)

I do use Instagram to share photos with friends, not all of whom are on other mutual social networks, but I never use the stupid filters.
However, it Blew. My. Mind. that the photos I uploaded were, by default, and without the use of a third party service, completely in excessable from outside the Instagram app on a mobile device.
There are APIs though, I assume that that's what this is using: http://instagre.at/
I have doubts about whether this works on gifs, but if the fancy to apply filters to photos on the fly hits you again, this is neat:
http://mezzoblue.github.com/PaintbrushJS/demo/
Instagram should add the ability to upload video, that you have to fast-forward/rewind like tape. And has the quality of tape.
Every so often you should have to take it out and use a pencil to pull the magnetic tape back in. Also, the videos should degrade every time you watch it and copies should be degraded quality as well. time. Instagram: I'm available for consulting!
I like your thinking. But for the record, 1992 called.
Please limit your posts to 140 characters or less.
Did I totally miss a reference or are you just a really big fan of the twitter format?