A Plead To Instagram

Flickr’s had it’s time. While there are dozens of great photo-sharing platforms out there, including Flickr and 500px, Instagram is probably the most functional social photo sharing platform. Or is it? If not for lack of basic features like account switching, Instagram would be the most functional photo sharing network. The merit of Instagram is that it is simple and has a very large audience. While Instagram has been slow to adapt to the market’s needs (thinking of the late entry into the Android world), it’s important to state the dire need for account switching.

Like Twitter, originally Instagram was created to act as an individual’s photo sharing portal. It was a simple, yet brilliant idea a social network with personal photo sharing at the heart of the concept.

Today, Instagram is different, speckled with hundreds of thousands of accounts that don’t represent individuals, but rather companies and organizations, and the way people use Instagram is different too. The main problem? There’s no easy way to switch between accounts.

This missing feature has been frowned upon for years, yet Instagram seems to have no plans to add it to the app, for reasons unknown.

Personally, I have 4 accounts that I manage, two of them actively. One of them, @antonpug, is a personal day-to-day account, another one is @atlanticnortheast, which is the Instagram account of the Atlantic Northeast Company, @GreatNW, an account that I’ve created to share great photos from the Pacific Northwest, and finally, @antonpugachevsky, an account I recently created to act as my photo portfolio where I’d share the best of my work.

In order to switch between accounts today, one needs to have multiple devices, a ludicrous proposition, if you ask me. The slightly less burdensome solution solution involves signing off and on between different accounts on the same device.

Why can’t we have a simple, elegant solution similar to what Twitter does, a solution that allows you to be simultaneously signed in to multiple accounts on one device? That simple feature would make everyone’s life a lot easier, and would benefit Instagram because I believe people would actually use it more if they didn’t have to go though logging out logging in to post a selfie when they are currently logged into their corporate Insta.

So Instagram, please, fix this.

Sincerely,
Avid Photographer.

Meetings are poisonous. End of story.

For most of us working in the IT field, meetings are a daily ordeal. From my experience in a couple companies, 50% of all meetings are at least 50% wasted time. The numbers are irrelevant, that's not the point. In particular, daily status meetings are what bugs me most. You might be getting fired up ready to debate with me "but, Anton, our standups move very fast and we don't EVER waste any time!". Sure, some teams are better than others, some days are better than others. But for the most part, meetings suck. Why am I writing about this? Because for the past month, I've been keeping track of how much time, out of 30 minutes that I am forced to stand and listen to everyone's updates, is actually relevant to me. In 16 meetings out of 20, less than 5 minutes of the meeting were actually relevant to me.

Now let's do the rough math. 25 minutes wasted for 16 days, amounts to almost 7 hours of work - that's a FULL DAY of productivity lost. And, a full day of me being bored. Nice.