A Stream of Postcards, Shot by Phone

The rising star of these is Instagram, a start-up in San Francisco with just four employees. In eight months, the company has attracted close to five million users to its iPhone-only service — no doubt earning the envy of its more established rivals. And Instagram is steadily growing, adding about a million users a month.

The app emphasizes simplicity. Users can choose from a variety of special effects to layer over photos, sharpening the contrast or applying a vintage, weathered look. Then they upload the photo to their Instagram feed, forming a river of pictures, not unlike a photo-only version of Twitter.

As on Twitter, users can follow others to see what they are posting. They can also tap to “like” pictures and comment on them, making Instagram a slimmed-down social network. People snap and post pictures of anything, like pretty wallpaper at a restaurant or artsy close-ups of their cat climbing on the bed in the morning, offering a behind-the-scenes look at their lives.

Those who study the way people socialize online say cellphone photos are becoming an integral part of sharing and communicating.

“It’s another way to start a conversation online, and so much easier than sitting in front of a computer because it’s mobile,” said S. Shyam Sundar, the co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University.

Professor Sundar said people once tended to take photos on special occasions, like birthdays and vacations, then post a big batch on services like Picasa and Flickr and share a link with friends. But with the introduction of smartphones with improved cameras, coupled with the rise of services like Facebook and Twitter, people are more accustomed to constantly documenting moments and sharing throughout the day.

“Instagram came on the scene right when people were beginning to work that into their regular broadcasting routine,” he said. “The convenience of a way to do it from your mobile phone — very easy.”

Kevin Systrom, a founder and the chief executive of Instagram, said the service’s early traction stemmed from its ability to make casual cellphone pictures look like works of art, with the help of filters.

“We set out to solve the main problem with taking pictures on a mobile phone,” he said, which is that they are often blurry or poorly composed. “We fixed that.”

The service has benefited from being easier to use than some of its rivals, said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner. “You take a photo, add a filter, post it online,” he said. “It’s the equivalent of firing off a tweet; it doesn’t require much thought or effort.”

Mr. Blau said Instagram’s early emphasis on opening its service to outside developers had helped it spread. For example, the service has given rise to a healthy network of companies and applications that offer ways to turn your shared photos into photobooks, framed prints and postcards. “You have a whole work force of software developers and entrepreneurs building products on top of your product,” he said.

The service is also attracting celebrities, brands and news organizations that see it as a new and nuanced way to interact with an audience. News outlets including NPR, ABC News, National Geographic, MTV and NBC are using Instagram to share picture updates and give audiences an insider’s view of their operations.

Joe Ruffalo, a senior vice president at ABC News Digital, said the company was experimenting with delivering news photos on Instagram as a way to reach people on a more intimate level.

“It provides a very different perspective to our followers than what they encounter on the Web or TV,” he said. ABC News has about 26,000 followers on Instagram, far fewer than on Facebook and Twitter.

Snoop Dogg and Rosie O’Donnell are Instagrammers, and Jamie Oliver, the British chef, uploads pictures of the meals he makes at home, as well as reminders to watch his TV show.

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Syrian Protesters Mass Again Despite Harsh Crackdown

The crowds protesting the authoritarian rule of President Bashar al-Assad appeared fueled in part by escalating anger about the torture and killing of a 13-year-old boy. Witnesses said protesters in dozens of communities on Friday dedicated their marches to him and other children killed during the uprising.

They defied the continuing brutal crackdown that has killed more than 1,000 people, with hundreds more rounded up in mass arrests.

On Friday, more than 30 protesters were killed in the city of Hamah, according to Rami Abdelrahman, a human rights monitor. That report could not be immediately confirmed.

The boy who was killed, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, has become a symbol of government oppression after a video of his mutilated body was circulated on YouTube.

“We won’t forgive, we will kill the child killer,” chanted protesters in Homs, a center of dissent, according to a witness who gave his name as Mohamed. “We will continue until your end.”

Earlier this week, Unicef issued an unusual statement describing “extreme violence against children in Syria.”

“We are particularly disturbed by the recent video images of children who were arbitrarily detained and suffered torture or ill-treatment during their detention, leading in some cases to their death,” the statement said.

Though Unicef has issued more general warnings about the effects of recent unrest in the Middle East on the lives of children there, the statement is the first time since the Arab Spring began that the organization has called on a specific government to investigate what it called “horrific acts” against children.

The Internet shutdown severely disrupted the flow of the YouTube videos and Facebook and Twitter posts that have allowed protesters and others to keep track of demonstrations, since foreign news media are banned and state media are heavily controlled. Both land lines and cellphones are so frequently monitored by Syria’s feared secret police that Skype had become a major means of communication among activists, and its loss as a tool may be a blow to the protest movement. Government Web sites, including those for the Ministry of Oil and the state news agency, SANA, remained online.

Two-thirds of Syria’s Internet network went offline at 6:35 a.m. Friday, said James Cowie, an analyst at Renesys, an Internet analytic firm, in a cascading blackout that took 30 minutes.

Forty of the country’s 59 Internet pathways were disabled, including Syria’s entire 3G mobile network, run by the country’s only telecom provider, Syriatel, which is owned by Rami Makhlouf, Mr. Assad’s cousin.

“People that want to use their smart phones to Tweet or read Web pages cannot,” Mr. Cowie said. “All of the IPs on those phones appear to be down.”

Phone service was also heavily disrupted across the country, and for the past several days, rights activists have reported that water and electricity had been shut off in a string of towns in central and southern Syria.

Egypt and Libya had earlier shut off access to the Internet in an attempt to crush popular uprisings led by young people and aided by social media networks.

“When a government shuts down the Internet, it shows the disconnection between the governing and the governed,” Alec Ross, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, wrote in a Twitter post on Friday afternoon.

Oula Abdulhamid, a Syrian activist who helped organize a conference for members of the Syrian opposition in Turkey this week, said the protest videos posted Friday were mainly the work of activists who had crossed Syria’s borders.

Liam Stack reported from Cairo, and Katherine Zoepf from New York. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

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