TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Earlier this year, Instagram’s co-founder Kevin Systrom talked with Kevin Rose and explained their vision for the future of the service. Chris Tackett provided a transcript of it for the Atlantic. Systrom said:

I think you alluded to it earlier when you said you could explore the world. Imagine a service that collects all of the visual data that gets produced all around the world so you can tune in to anyplace on earth to see exactly what’s happening, whether that is a friend’s birthday party that you’re missing or a wedding happening that you didn’t go to or a riot breaking out overseas. Or something as personal as a baby’s first steps. 

These are all moments that are happening around the world and that we capture with our cameras, right, and that is visual  media that before was sitting on someone’s camera or phone and just sitting there. What happens in the world when you take all that data and combine it in a network?

It’s a great, exciting idea, something I hope we’ll still see from Instagram. But it should be obvious while that’s also exciting for Facebook, but for different reasons.

It’s absolutely worth watching the full discussion between Systrom and Rose, too. He talks a lot about what led to founding Instagram, the design decisions they made, and the mistakes they made, too. Fascinating discussion.