Instagram grabs spotlight for US storm pictures

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Instagram, the photo-sharing app recently acquired by Facebook, came into the limelight this week as a key source for pictures showing the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

Photos of the storm were popping up on many social networks including Twitter and Google+, but Instagram data showed at least 521,000 photos with the hashtag Sandy.

Another 306,000 were tagged #hurricaneSandy and 39,000 tagged #Frankenstorm. Jeff Sonderman, a digital media fellow at The Poynter Institute, said that at one point Instagram was posting 10 pictures of the storm per second. "Natural disasters and tragedies are emerging as a way for social media services to gain respect and legitimacy as world-changing agents as well," he said.

"You can see why a national disaster as told through Instagram could be powerful. In theory, Instagram has Twitter's immediacy, and a broader reach, since it pushes notices out via Twitter, Facebook, Instgram's own network, and email. Clearly images are the best way to tell a story like this, and Instagram's whole raison d'etre is to make people better photographers." On Twitter, some 147,000 pictures were posted over a 24-hour period tagged Sandy.