October Side Project: Moderated Instagram feed
So, my sideproject for October 2014 is a thing that we need for our clients at Standout. I will build a simple moderated Instagram feed that you can embed directly on any website.
The problem
We have clients that wants to display all Instagram photos for a specific hashtag, for example everything that is tagged with #stockholm or #standout, but they want control over the photos that are displayed on their website.
Most photos on Instagram are okay, but once in a while you will se a bad photo showing up on unknowing customer’s sites, or even competitors trying to get their photos in.
Instagram can never build this moderation tool within a hashtag feed since the feed is the same for all users, so they can only remove photos that breaks their terms and conditions. This is not enough for keeping a competitor out of “your” hashtag, or removing “ugly” photos that does not match you webpage.
Features
- Embed a moderated Instagram feed on your website
- Get a daily e-mail with new photos in your selected hash tags
- Remove images from the feed
- Combine multiple hash tags
- Create multiple feeds
- Whitelist accounts - allow all photos from certain Instagram accounts
- Get the moderated feed in JSON format if you want to programmaticaly do something more with it.
Challenges
The main challenge in this is keeping it simple. I get a ton of ideas on how to improve this idea, but I will keep it as simple as possible for the first release and see how we can use it with our real customer’s sites.
On the technical side I need to prepare for embedding on high traffic sites. Most things can be outputted in static files that gets updated regularly. My goal is to have customers all over the world, so some kind of CDN solution for the embeds would be nice.
Legally, can I do this? It sounds like fair use of the Instagram service to me, but I have to pick a name that is okay. Instagram has some strange wording in their brand policy where they seem to claim the ownership of both ‘Insta’ and ‘Gram’. So we’ll have to see about the name. My initial thought was Gramfilter but I see now that it can not be used. Give me some ideas, folks!
Money
This will be a paid service, but I haven’t decided on pricing yet. I always find the pricing the hardest part in web apps, so any advice is welcome.
I am thinking that I could charge $5 per month, or $49 for a full year. I guess most programmers would charge a lot more for solving this problem for their clients without this app, so it seems reasonable. But I may change my mind completely on this.
Timeplan
As usual, this app will be up and running before the end of the current month: October 2014.