Let’s Instagram The Web

Wouldn’t it be cool if we built the Instagram for desktop?

On first glance that might sound ridiculous. But I believe there’s a market for it and no one’s done it well yet.

As a user I desperately want a simple way to grab a portion of a page as an image and share it with friends. Something that doesn’t require “saving” or “uploading”.

This functionality is massively popular on mobile. We’ve had cameras in our phones for close to 10 years now.

On the desktop, grabbing an image of a page is non-standard and most of my friends still don’t really know how to put an image in an email. You need some kind of chrome add-on, firefox extension or desktop app combined usually with a file hosting service.

Unless you write blog posts regularly you likely don’t know about imgur and don’t know how to grab screenshots quickly and easily. But people love sharing images and the web is visual. So let’s get sharing.

Google Should Nail Screenshot Image Sharing With Chrome & Google+ #

Google is perfectly placed to nail this functionality with some combination of Chrome, Google+ and Google Drive. I imagine it would look a little something like this:

As Browsers Converge This Is The Future #

In this day and age all the modern browsers are largely the same. Will your average user notice a big difference between the latest Firefox, Chrome or IE? Probably not.

So where does the next round of innovation come from in the browser wars? In my opinion it comes from features like this (and features like persisting session across devices)