It’s true, I’m addicted to sunsets. At this point, my entire Instagram account is just a collection of sunsets. But it looks like I’m not the only one. Infinite Sunset is a neat little Instagram hack that pulls sunset pictures from Instagram to put together an ever-changing, infinite sunset.
Behind the scene, André Serante and Vítor Manfredini have built a tiny algorithm that searches for public Instagram photos with the #sunset hashtag. They keep the most relevant ones to display them in your browser. Every ten or fifteen seconds, you get a new picture with the city, timestamp and author.
For instance, I saw a picture with two lines of text that say “Oslo, Norway, shot 4 minutes ago by @paweljjj.” It gives a sense of instantaneity and lets you travel around the world from your web browser.
There’s one little button at the bottom of the page. And sure enough, it features the perfect quote from The Little Prince. “But on your tiny planet, my little prince, all you need to do is move your chair a few steps. You can see the day end and the twilight falling whenever you like,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote.
Infinite Sunset isn’t a technical achievement. It isn’t even something you’re going to use every day. And yet, I’ve been mesmerized by this page for a few minutes now. It’s the kind of poetic hack that I love. Sometimes, tech can convey feelings.
