On Instagram, "picture talking" is very common since the service is completely geared towards pictures but people still want to use words from time to time.
So to express a thought or thank friends, Instagram users have to find a way to put words onto a picture. The most common is to write a note in Notes, take a screenshot and upload that. But on the stylish communication medium that Instagram is, it can look a little gauche. So people will often upload pictures of handwritten notes, etc. which have some class but not everyone wants to go to that much effort.
The easiest thing is to offer a 612x612 template and the ability to show a PNG that users could then save to their Camera Roll and then upload to Instagram. If you can connect with the user's Instagram account and let them upload from Instagram like Chute does, even better!
Disclaimer: been totally cranking on my own words-on-pictures app for the last few weeks — congrats!
My wife has at least 3 different apps that let her drop text on images before posting to Instagram. But everyone uses Instagram on their phone, so a web-app doesn't really work here. And the Instagram API is read only at the moment.
Can't some code screen scrape instagram and then get the picture data that way? I screen scrape using firefox using zc.testbrowser libraries but there's libraries where you don't need a browser. hacking that together in curl or even mechanize would be insane w/ php or python because its so much javascript.
I'm sure instagram wouldn't want you logging in with somebodies account and it would come from your server ip unless you have the scripts use proxies to get the data. If you use fb to login you would run into roadblocking accounts plus asking for a fb pw is stuff that only apps like spotify can get away with.
