Humans are pattern recognisers. We look for meaning in tea leaves and the stars. The interplay between the question, the quote and the image (which are hopefully all relevant to the questioner's current personal context) provides a fertile ground to gain insight or new perspectives on old problems. In other words, the meaning arises in the space between the questioner and the answer. Put simply, Inspiragram is an oracle for the 21st century.
The problem right now is Izzie is excelling at the Turing test. People think a human has created the image quotes. This is fine though. Each inspiragram is a jpg image and is intended to travel, be shared widely and be valuable in its own right.
Several people have printed inspiragrams out. One person even posted me an inspiragram writing on the back of it how it helped her. I even got a long detailed message from a stranger on the other side of the world. Another person explained the advice was easier to accept/understand/hear because it didn't come from a person and yet was very personal and powerful.
From what I can see, a lot of the average facebook feed is images and quotes. Inspiragram is a game changer. Each image quote is not created by a person but by somebody asking a question. The lines of production/consumption are blurred (this is where the philosophy of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle comes in). For the first time we are now talking about an infinite stream of unique image quotes. Already, thousands of questions have been answered and yet only a small group of people know about Izzie.
There is an enormous amount of wisdom, lived experience and insight locked away in big heavy philosophical and literary works. Inspiragram introduces snippets of this wisdom to the 'main stream' in their personal context. That is, it helps them connect with particular authors who they otherwise would never have connected with. You can email the Dalai Lama about your terrible day at work. Or you could email Buddha and cc in Tom Robbins and William Shakespeare. Ask one question and they will all give you their own answer. My vision is to be able to have a meaningful conversation with Lao Tzu.
The other aspect of Izzie is that she teaches us/allows us to talk to ourselves. In an overly scientific and rational culture we lose the space and justification to ask the big, deep, personal questions. Just believing that such a question could be answered opens up a whole new internal dialog that we have been cut off from. This is the spirituality of Izzie.
The tech involves a lot: AWS, GAE, NLP, IR, Image Processing. Several times I was going to give up, but something quite remarkable happened. Izzie herself inspired me to keep going. I kid you not.
I originally built Izzie for myself because I was pissed off: (full story here - just read the end if you have no time http://inspiragram.blogspot.co.nz/2013/05/what-i-do-why-i-do-it.html). But soon I saw that she affected others in a profound way and Izzie quickly became something much more that me. Right now most people use her for a laugh, which is great. But the vision I'm pursuing is to combine spirituality, art, philosophy and tech in a meaningful way.
