Pingram.me Pinterest and Instagram, the founder interview

While we are awaiting for Kevin´s words next sunday at SXSW, Instagram tools and apps galaxy keeps on expanding each day. Our community estimated in around 25 million users is greed of more tools around our fav photo-sharing App and a lot of projects are sprouting here and there. Today we met an italian guy, Genarro Varriale.

Gennaro Varriale better known as @ironico both on Instagram and Twitter had the simple but fabulous idea to mash up two platforms. These two “social network” are probably the most trendy projects today and are in the mouth of all. Pinterest and Instagram.

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Gennarro and Pingram

Gennaro lives and works in a southern and wonderful Italian city called Naples. He spends most of his time reading and share it with photography and programming.

He was probably one of the first users in Italy in Instagram and he is user number: 160.794 among the 25 million users we are now. He admits, he is in love with Instagram and  made his first shot on October 17th, 2010. That´s to say just few days after the launching of the app in U.S.

He is married and even shares a web Itaria.it  (an “italian-japanese” website) with his wife. He has also his own website gennarovarriale.it , his cool, italian language, blog where he enjoys writing about programming.

One year after, one day, he had an idea.  We live in a world of mixes and blending things. Why don´t “Mash up Pinterest and Instagram”?

Since few days, his web browser was meeting a certain success and yesterday he finally received an amazing award being featured at Mashable.

He kindly accepted to answer our questions.

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How did this Pingram.me project come to your mind?

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I use pinterest and  love collecting photos in boards. One day, while i was searching a way to pin my instagram pics this idea came to my mind.  How to make easy sharing instagram photos with a cool and clean interface, very similar to Pinterest with an infinite scroll down and a possibility of vanity url page for each users.

Initially, I developed this web tool for my personal use until I thought it could a great idea to share it with the whole Igers community.

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I use Instagram since the real beginning of the app in october 2010  and I started using Pinterest just a few months ago. I like the clean and useful Pinterest interface, and I think it was the perfect way to show instagram pics. And I highly recommend Instagramers to check my tool pingram.me and decide themselves.

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I created pingram.me during  the week-end. I spent  around 7 hours on the first version. It was a way  to take a break after a hard work. I was developing many different webs for different customers and curiously, I took a break programming at home. And I couldn´t expect myself pingram.me would meet such a success.

In the last days,  I have many request of interview, messages, information, new features etc… and I ran out of free time!!! What a beautiful way to relax!

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How will you define difference between Instagram and Pingram.me?

Instagram is an app to make photos with nice effects and share it with other people. Pingram.me is a web browser that allows you to check instagram pics with an infinite scrolling. Much like on Instagram, you can browse through pics on Pingram.me and check out a feed of “populars” of the moment. If you find out a pic you like (or just want to share your own), you can pin pics directly to Pinterest from Pingram.me

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I have no relation at all with Instagram team, but I love their work and their API.

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I was definitely very excited! But i’m very happy for your attention featuring me too. I usually read your Instagramers website and  I find very interesting your weekly “FocusOn Section”. As probably loads of Igers I wished I could be featured one  day in your weekly interview section because of the quality of my work and pics. lol. (he is not bad! watch his pic beside)

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Today or the day after, I will launch a much more clean interface. And in the few next days,  I will add new important features like “Comments, Likes, Widgets and other social integration stuffs, and so on). I have tons of ideas and would like to provide Instagram users as I´am an instagramer myself!

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Thanks Gennaro! Long Life to Pingram.me and hope you will meet a huge success worldwide!

You can see all his pics in pingram.me/ironico and follow him on Instagram and Twitter.

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@philgonzalez