Tag Archives: instagram

Single User Utility In a Social System

Don’t get knocked off your feet by the sheer strength of my agreement with Fred Wilson on Single User Utility In a Social System:

One of the most important lessons we took from delicious was the value of single user utility in social systems. It might seem odd that systems designed to leverage interactions between people can have (should have?) single person utility. But I strongly believe they should.

In short; single user utility is the fact that an application or service can be valuable to a single user with or without the social components like the network, sharing, etc.

Delicious is a good example of this, as Wilson describes, but there are many others. Path, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, the now discontinued Nilai, and many more have their own single user utility.

Bad examples? Google+, Instagram. Both of these would be fairly meaningless without the social components.

Social components should multiply the value of a service not be the only value of a service.

Flickr Premium?

Danny Nicolas has been keeping up with my Flickr commentary of late about how Flickr should create a more affordable, less feature-rich account type and he has a few things to add:

I feel as if most people currently paying for Flickr Pro don’t take advantage of all the features offered. I might even go in the other direction and have the current Flickr Pro offering become the mid-size account, and offer a more expensive Business account that doesn’t have file size or video limitations.

My main argument for why I think Flickr should make a scaled-down account is more about price than about features. I was a paying Flickr Pro user for many years, as was my wife, and we never utilized the account to the full. Though I’m sure more serious photographers do. However, in today’s market of mobile apps and the services that power them, most people will not pay $24 a year to share photos with their friends. And I don’t think the Instagram generation needs Flickr Pro. But I do think they’d pay enough to make it worth Flickr’s while to create a more affordable account with less features.

Creating a Premium account is an interesting idea and is always on the table for SaaS platforms. But I don’t think that is the right strategy for Flickr. I doubt there are many members that are pining for more features or space or video capabilities. They can go elsewhere for video. I believe there is a goldmine of brand new users that are dabbling with Instagram – to the tune of tens of millions perhaps – that would love a few extra features that Instagram simply does not provide (stats, groups, sets, etc.) and all Flickr has to do is price the account just right, and market it properly, in order to suck them all in.

Again, Danny:

Whatever their strategy for success may be, Flickr must evade further stagnation in order to be competitive. They can’t ignore and leave new markets wide open like they did with mobile. They have the opportunity to become a powerful weapon in the hands of Yahoo.

It is amazing to me that so many people see Instagram as Flickr’s failing. But it is obvious. The people that were the innovators in photo sharing missed the boat. I think the problem is that Flickr became a business very quickly after joining Yahoo! It went from being an innovative product that was really trying to solve problems to a business that needed to make money and innovation sort of was pushed to the side. And the fact that we didn’t hear anything from Flickr for years was mind-boggling. I have no idea what they’ve been doing for the last few years.

Danny nailed it when he mentioned cannibalization. Some of the things Flickr should have done over the last several years were no doubt thought of and even sketched out but perhaps decided against for that very reason. They didn’t want to lose current customers. But they may have to do just that in order to grow again.

Yahoo! needs to invest in Flickr. They need to let the team know they can take chances again. They can try and fail and try again. They need resources, talent, and a someone with a clear vision to run the entire thing.

If Marisa runs Flickr like she ran search at Google Flickr will succeed. If she runs it the way Google+, Buzz, and Wave was run she won’t. And there is a subtle difference between the two approaches. Google+, Buzz, and Wave were innovations, no doubt, but without any real value or use case that was obvious. I remember trying Wave for the first time and having no idea what it was for. The products were perhaps a little too innovative. Instagram isn’t so much an innovation as it a well-designed simple solution that brings delight to people every day. Google search is a well-designed (seemingly) simple solution that brings an amazing amount of value to people every day. Flickr should aim for one of those; delight or value. I’d pick delight.

The advantages and disadvantages of feature roll outs

If you’re a member of a fairly popular web service you’re probably becoming more and more familiar with feature roll outs.

A feature roll out is when a new feature is added to a service for a certain number of users at a time and, after some duration of time, every user on that service ends up with the new feature. This process could take hours, days, weeks.

There are a lot of reasons a company may need or want to do a feature roll out. There are also reasons a company may want to avoid doing them. Lets first look at why a company may need to roll a feature out.

Some features on these large-scale platforms are incredibly taxing on the technology infrastructure of a service. Say, for instance, that YouTube released a feature that allowed its users to re-encode all of their videos into a higher quality than they previously allowed. YouTube has billions of minutes of video. If every one of their users were allowed to do this all at once they’d bring YouTube’s infrastructure (world-class though it may be) to its knees.

Twitter’s recent roll out of a feature that allows its members to download all of their tweets in an archive is another example. While certainly not as intense as video encoding, gathering up tens-of-thousands of tweets and creating a neat and tidy archive of them does take some horsepower. They’ve decided to roll this feature out.

Another, slightly more technical, reason that a company may need to roll out a feature over time would be that they split their traffic onto many different web nodes. Or, actual web servers or clusters of servers. Each of those web nodes being updated at exactly the same time would bring the service down for a short period of time. High-capacity, “always up”, networks like Twitter can not afford to have downtime across all nodes at once. So they may roll out a feature so that their service remains up and running and they only have to pull down one node at a time, moving the traffic that would normally go to those nodes to other nodes temporarily, to update it with the new feature.

But why would a company want to roll out a new feature even if they didn’t need to? There are many advantages and I think one of the best ones that is often overlooked is hype. Remember when Instagram rolled out web profiles? It took the better part of a week for everyone to get their web profiles.

If you don’t see your profile yet, be assured that you’ll see it in the next few days. We’re rolling out profiles to everyone on Instagram over the course of this week.

A week. Even with 100,000,000 users a week in internet-speak is just about one year and three months. But with a certain number of users getting their web profiles each and every day they got an amazing amount of word-of-mouth for free. “Yay! I got my web profile!!” followed by a link on Twitter from a huge percentage of users. If for no other reason then to have Instagram on everyone’s mind for an entire week it was worth rolling this feature out over time rather than giving it out relatively immediately to everyone.

Another advantage worth noting is that by rolling out a feature the company is able to monitor the progress, effectiveness, and use of the feature and has more of a chance to correct things as the feature rolls out. If a feature has a direct impact on the stability or cost of running the service then rolling it out over time gives you a better idea of how well the feature is doing at attacking that goal. If a feature is brand-new and the company wants to see if users will A) use it and B) figure out how to use it correctly – by rolling it out you can get some sense as to how users interact with the feature. This is very advantageous.

Why would a company want to avoid feature roll outs? Announcing features that users do not have yet is always risky business. It is almost never a good idea. Some of the risk falls on user awareness. If a user learns about a feature and gets excited to use it and can not use it for a week they’re likely to forget about it a week later. You’re also likely to create higher expectations for a feature than you’re able to deliver on. I’m sure the Instagram users that got their web profile a week after they were announced had a slightly less excited response at getting them than the ones that did in the first day or two.

Feature roll outs are sometimes a necessity, sometimes a tool, and sometimes a bad idea. Choose carefully.

Any other advantages or disadvantages? Chime in on Hacker News.

Quit Instagram, They Said.

MG Siegler, who inexplicably still writes for AOL TechCrunch, writes about people “quitting” Instagram.

The real world: Quit, verb, to leave (a place), usually permanently.

The internet: Quit, verb, to threaten to leave as loudly as possible, usually over something stupid, then do nothing.

I’ll admit it. When I first saw the Instagram news I too wanted to look at my options for leaving the service. But I wasn’t about to delete my account 30 days before the policy would have even been put into place.

I’ve seen people quit Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram only to come back a few days later and need to rebuild their entire accounts under new usernames because they thought better of it. To each their own but at least allow news like this to sink in for a day or two before you make a decision.

Instagram responds to backlash

The web has been ablaze yesterday and today about the new Instagram policies. Instagram has written a blog post to ensure everyone that there has been some confusion and they are going to do whatever they can to make everything more clear.

Good. I hope everyone didn’t go and delete their Instagram accounts without waiting until everything really shook out.

Instagram backlash is Flickr’s gain

Tom Warren, of The Verge, agrees with me about Flickr gaining from this recent Instagram policy change:

With a nicely redesigned client and support for filters, Flickr is finally catching up to battle Instagram on the photo sharing front. And its dormant community of lapsed Pro users (who are required to pay a nominal fee each year) could be awakened after Instagram users realize they’re the product of advertisers. It could be a temporary backlash, the same type we witness whenever Facebook adjusts its news feed, but competitors are ready this time and Twitter and Flickr are waiting in the wings for a share of Instagram’s unhappy user base.

He calls what Flickr charges for its Pro account a “nominal fee” and for what you get I suppose it is. Warren states that Flickr Pro users, like myself, will come out of hiding and reup their accounts. That may be true but I don’t think we’ll see new users jettisoning from Instagram and signing up to Flickr as Pro users. I would, however, see them moving over in droves if there were a cheaper account level that stated, simply, that Flickr/Yahoo wouldn’t use their information for advertising purposes.

Your move Yahoo!.

How Flickr can eat Instagram’s table scraps. I’m Instagram’s table scraps. And so are you.

Before I even get started; Flickr can not stop Instagram at this point. Flickr can not beat Instagram in terms of hockey-stick-growth. Even with Instagram’s recent policy changes Instagram is on a trajectory to hit the nearest star and Flickr nor Bruce Willis can stop them now. But, to succeed they do not need to win – they just need to capture as many Instagram-escapees as possible.

Flickr has long since been very good at a few things; sharing, licensing, and interoperability. It is one of the reasons Flickr was included in Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost; Flickr’s API is world-class and the entire Internet can benefit from its rich offerings.

Instagram being bought by Facebook was the first step in the wrong direction in the eyes of many web veterans. And there are more and more web veterans every single day as the web gets older. Web veterans are people that know better. Web veterans know that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram aren’t the Internet. In fact, they are the antithesis of the Internet. These companies do whatever they possibily can to pigeon hole people onto their websites for as many hours throughout the day as possible. The rest of the web, the real web, tries to solve a problem for people while playing nicely with every other service out there.

Flickr made the first big step in capitalizing on Instagram’s move to Facebook last week when they debuted a brand-new iOS application that has gotten rave reviews from web newb and veteran alike.

However, Flickr is too expensive for people casually sharing a filtered photo from their mobile cameras now and then. Yes, you can use Flickr for free for up to 200 photos but I think just about anyone with a Flickr account would much prefer to have all of their photos available all of the time.

If Flickr were to change their model just slightly – one from a pro backup and catalog solution to one of sharing – they could easily win a ton of accounts that are falling off of the Facebook/Instagram table on a daily basis. Perhaps creating a cheaper account-type that costs, say $5 or $7 per year, would be enough for the web veterans (again, there are a lot of us) to completely jump ship from Instagram and pony up. This way, we would never have to worry about advertisements, creepy data collection, or wondering if our data will ever be trapped on someone else’s servers. And believe me, this isn’t something that is terrible difficult for Flickr to give a shot. They have everything they could possibly need already in place to do this.

Flickr, you’ve already made one step. Take the next step and bring us all back home again.

[discuss on Hacker News]

 

Instagram’s new privacy policy

In short; Instagram is now going to share your information with its parent-company Facebook in order to serve more relevant ads. Instagram will share things like the places you visit, your interests (remember all those photos you’ve liked?), and even your photos in order to tailor advertising to you.

You can look at this any number of ways. On the one hand, if Instagram is free and we have to see advertisements in order to use it – wouldn’t it be great to see ads that you’d actually like to see rather than ads you really wouldn’t be interested in? On the other hand, it sort of stinks that the photos you share, the places you visit, and the people you know all become currency for Facebook.

This change goes into affect on January 16, 2013. The only way to opt-out of these changes is to literally delete your account.

Just when Instagram really started to become great, they go and make us think they are creepy.

Why Twitter introduced photo filters

Matthew Panzarino:

As photos and other media become a bigger part of Twitter’s strategy in the future, it can’t have this kind of thing completely at the mercy of a service owned by a competitor.

Instagram’s being able to simply yank Twitter’s ability to embed images inline on their site and apps is far too much control for Twitter to be comfortable with. Makes sense to me. And, as Marco said, I hope it is this reason and not to try to hurt Instagram. Because that wouldn’t work.

Follow me on Instagram. Or, why web profiles are a big deal for Instagram.

Instagram recently released web profiles for all users. Of course, your Twitter stream has probably been full of people linking to theirs recently*. Oh, here is mine. You may have seen so many people mention their Instagram web profile that you’re sick of it.

But don’t underestimate the importance of this feature to Instagram’s growth. Think about how many times you’ve seen people say, on Twitter or Facebook or their blogs, “Follow me on Instagram, I’m cdevroe.” Celebrities, with tens of millions of Twitter followers, had to ask their audience to launch Instagram, go to the search users pane, and type in their usernames there. And some usernames aren’t so typing friendly. Obviously some did that, but some didn’t.

Now, though, anyone can link to their Instagram profile. And rather than only a small percentage of people from Twitter following them on Instagram they will probably get a much larger portion of their audience to do so. This is big. And it isn’t just about follows either. People can like and comment on photos from these profiles too. So interactivity on Instagram is skyrocketing.

I think Instagram’s growth rate will increase with these web profiles in place.

* Instagram, like many other wildly popular social networks, released this new feature to all users over the course of about a week. There are many reasons for doing this not the least of which is the computational power you’d need to generate 100 million web profiles. However, I also see this as a sly way of having your users trumpet a new feature for you. It is free marketing. If everyone got their shiny new web profiles on the same day Instagram would have gotten one days worth of press about it. By releasing them over the course of a week they got a full week’s worth.

Hipstamatic was playing the wrong game

Austin Carr in a retelling of the Hipstamatic story for FastCompany:

“By March of 2011, when Hipstamatic hired its new designer, Laura Polkus, Instagram had already rocketed to 2.2 million users, and was growing by 130,000 users per week. But Polkus says the team largely ignored Instagram. “There wasn’t a whole lot of attention paid there,” says Polkus, who was later let go. “The conversation internally was, ‘Well, we’re completely different. They are a social network, and we are not. Who cares what’s going on with them? We’ll just continue to do what we do.’ But from the public’s perspective, that’s obviously not the way things were seen.”

I’ve seen this in many companies. I’ve been guilty of this stance myself. It is at the brink of competition that one resists it the most. When the world begins to compare what you’re building with what someone else has built you immediately reject that idea, trying to tell anyone that brings it up that you’re different or will be different or want to be different.

But the fact is, the world doesn’t have time to figure out why you’re different on their own. You need to show them. And in order to show them you may need to come off of your existing product roadmap and work on marketing. It isn’t fun – at least not for builders. To take a break from building things in order to make sure that your messaging is right? Eeek. Gag. But that is exactly what you need to do. You need to show the world how you’re different so that there isn’t a question.

But some will go down in flames rather than strive to make this distinction in the marketplace. Using Hipstamatic vs. Instagram as the lens for this argument you can see how the world viewed the two applications in general terms; a camera app that lets you add filters to your photos and share them with friends. Instagram won because it was free, was much easier to use, and had a social network built into the app and didn’t rely on using a social network you’ve built elsewhere.

So, one could say that Hipstamatic lost to Instagram. But that is because they were playing the wrong game. (And, if you read the FastCompany article you can see they spent rather lavishly and had very little regard for running a good business.)

If you back up a little and look at this same argument using App.net vs. Twitter as your lens you can see this same situation happening in reverse. Twitter; free, easy. App.net; costs money, is seemingly the same service. But there is a catch; App.net doesn’t need to “beat Twitter” to be a success. Hipstamatic didn’t need to beat Instagram to be a success. They just needed to clearly define the differences between the applications and aim to be a great, paid alternative.

I don’t pretend to know what the differentiators should have been between Hipstamatic and Instagram but I can say that not being owned by Facebook would have been an excellent start.

My island on this ocean

Me, over four years ago:

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

What a difference four years can make! Pownce, Ma.gnolia, Cork’d, TUG.n, all gone. Flickr rarely gets my attention. Twitter is still here but is changing policies more often than I change my shirt. Viddler, I’m very proud to say, is stronger than ever but is certainly a much different service than it was then.

The Internet is like the open ocean and what we publish seems to be on a life raft simply going along for the ride. Yet our personal websites seem to be like small islands in this ocean. Sure, their beaches may change from time-to-time but the island remains – like a beacon to all travelers that we’re still here – somewhere to always come back to as these rafts take on water and eventually sink into the deep.

This environment forces me to rethink, yet again, how and where I publish on the web. This internal debate seems to be one that keeps coming up, over and over, year after year, as the ocean of the Internet ebbs and flows.

Should I simply post everything that I publish directly to this site and nowhere else? Do I cross post things to this site and also onto other services? Do I simply link back to this site from those services? Do I syndicate to those services with their own accounts (like I do now on Twitter and Facebook for this site)? Do I post some content here and some content elsewhere?

Believe it or not, and you may think I’m crazy, but these questions plague me all of the time. I constantly struggle with this. And I never seem to muster the conviction to make a hard choice and so I’ve got content everywhere; Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the brand-new App.net, Flickr, a little on Google+, and so on.

Why does it take conviction to limit myself to only posting on this site? Because there is a pull and a need to share this content with as many people as possible. With nearly 2,000 followers on Twitter, a few hundred on Instagram, friends and family on Flickr, etc. it is hard to limit the exposure of this content. I want people to see what I’m publishing. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. This site, as it stands, only has a relatively small audience. Some of my posts get views in the single digits, others, in the hundreds of thousands. So I can never really be sure how many people are paying attention. That is why it takes conviction. I have to be OK with the fact that maybe, just maybe, no one will notice. And maybe, just maybe, no one will care.

I think I’ve gotten to that point. Even as I write this I’m coming around to the idea that I don’t really need anyone to read this post. And if they do read it I’d much rather them read it here than on Facebook or Google+. Whether or not I choose to publish here on my site or elsewhere doesn’t really matter at all to anyone but me. And I want to publish to my site. So I should publish in a way that makes me happy, right?

There is an upside to making this a hard, line-in-the-sand choice. If anything I post is shared around the web it will point back to my website. My island. Some have built up enormous followings on Twitter and Instagram. What happens when they go away or change? I’d much rather people remember me for my website than for my Instagram stream.

So what does this mean? Well, I’ve thought about it. And I’m still going to tweet. Though probably far less. Twenty-five thousand plus tweets so far and counting. My entire family and most of my close friends are on Twitter. And, using Twitter Lists, I’m able to get a lot of value from this service. Far more than any other. However, I’m done with Facebook, Google+, Flickr, ADN and Instagram (even though I love Instagram). Everything that I publish is going to be on this site. Follow, don’t follow, it is up to you.

 

Do you deal with this struggle? I’d love to read about how you’re dealing with it on Hacker News.

 

Some have asked if they’ll be able to stay subscribed to this site via Twitter and Facebook. Yes, you will. As long as their policies allow for it. And also RSS if you’re a nerd like me.

Instagram updated for iOS 6 and iPhone 5

If you use Instagram and you updated to iOS 6 or bought an iPhone 5; you may now update. Seeing the first few comments in addition to the likes on a photo in Instagram is actually a palpable upgrade in experience.

Addendum: Something I didn’t notice, because I literally have never used this feature, is that Instagram is “phasing out live filters”. Live filters means that when you take a photo you can optionally choose to see how the filter will look even before you shoot the photo. It sounds great on paper but it forced Instagram to create what some feel are less superior filters overall. So, by getting rid of them, they can presumably make better filters and – perhaps – even more filters more quickly? We’ll see.

Addendum /via John Gruber.

Instagram 2.5 for iOS

Instagram was just updated to version 2.5. Here are a few of the highlights.

  • Revamped profile tab
  • Search for users and tags in the Explore tab
  • Improvements to commenting
  • User search autocompletes based on people you follow
  • Visual improvements
  • Speed optimizations
  • Optionally share likes to Facebook (enable in your Profile > Sharing Settings > Facebook)

This is a decent upgrade and there are a few things to note. Instagram’s rapid growth has been, in part, due to its Popular tab. Even if you were new to the network you could easily see stunning photos. The Popular tab is now called Explore. And this is important for product people to note. Instagram needed an easier way to find photos you might be interested in (such as an event or other interest) and also find users. And many would be scared to “mess with” the Popular tab. However, taking the most popular tab (the Popular tab) and adding those features to it really shows what Instagram considers important. They want people to discover people and photos easier than ever.

Also, cross-network “likes” is an interesting concept that we’re about to see a lot more of. It will even be in Mac OS X Mountain Lion next month.

There are some hidden gems in this release to including this one from Keegan Jones.

Is Surface Microsoft’s next chapter?

Yesterday I wrote:

I think Microsoft should focus and invest in making this their flagship product…

Joshua Topolsky of The Verge on Microsoft’s “shift” with the Surface:

That’s a big shift, and it’s an important one. The announcement of the Surface shows that Microsoft is ready to make a break with its history — a history of hardware partnerships which relied on companies like Dell, HP, or Acer to actually bring its products to market.

I’m really hopeful that Surface is a true competitor to the iPad. Competition is good for everyone – especially the consumer. The 45-minute keynote – although very distilled and way, way too over-rehearsed – really did give you a good demonstration that Surface could actually be quite good. Quite valuable. And extremely versatile. Yes, perhaps even more versatile than the iPad.

And, yes, Microsoft could be going solely after the Enterprise market – the business class – with Surface. Though in the keynote Ballmer did repeat, a few times, that people like “to consume”, “to play”, with devices like this.

But, as my friend Om Malik reminded me on Instagram, we haven’t yet used the Surface. No one really has. Microsoft has come out and made a magnificient demonstration of a product that they have no idea how much to charge for, have little idea of when it will be available, and will not allow anyone to touch. I, forever being an optimist, have to keep something in perspective – This is Microsoft. This is Microsoft. This is Microsoft.