[HTML3]Now for as much as I love the Portland startup scene and all of our homegrown goodness, I have to admit that I take a certain pleasure in the random Portland connections to other popular Web stuff. Like the fact that the creator of LiveJournal went to high school in Aloha. Or that ReadWriteWeb employs a good chunk of Portlanders. Or that the community manager for Vimeo lives here.
Well, here’s another one to add to the list. You know Instagram, that wickedly popular photo app for the iPhone? Yeah, well they’ve got a Portland connection too.
If you’re not familiar with Instagram, it’s been taking the world of iPhone photography by storm. Barely a month old, it’s rapidly become the go to app for taking and sharing iPhone photos. And with good reason. It brings together all of the best of elements of Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare. Letting you take, tweak, share, comment, like, and geotag photos all from one spot.
It’s all socially and photo-y and stuff. And, well, fun. Remember the whole having fun thing?
So turns out that that awesome little app? It also has a Portland connection. Meet Josh Riedel, community manager for Instagram.
After his previous employer—Nextstop—was acquired by a little company called Facebook, Josh decided to come back to the home of his alma mater, Reed College. Next thing he knew, he was getting a call from a former Nextstop cohort who had just built an app that was taking off like wildfire, Instagram.
Like Nextstop, Josh was brought on to serve as community manager.
“I’m essentially responsible for making sure Instagram grows into a healthy, creative, vibrant community,” said Josh.
So he’s working to better understand the community, figure out how people are using the app, take feature requests, and answer questions.
What’s that? Feature requests? Oh, I’d really really like to be able to swipe across the image to run through the different filters. I mean, if you’re asking.
I’m sorry. Where was I? Oh yes. And he’s doing all that right here. From good old Portland, Oregon, the de facto hub of mobile development. And community management. Yeah. i just added that one.
And it probably goes without saying, but Josh would love to have some more followers from Portland—he’s “Josh” on Instagram.
For more information, visit Instagr.am. Or follow @instagram on Twitter. To download the iPhone app—it’s free—visit Instagram in the App Store.
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