Tag: instagram

  • Blogging is alive and well

    Oh man am I happy! People that hadn’t written on their blog in a long time are blogging again. Websites that hadn’t been updated in many years, some over a decade, are being spruced up and published to again. And popular news outlets are publishing articles about blogging. Of course, those of us that have…

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  • Disbanding the POSSE

    For the past several years I’ve been POSSE-ing. In Indieweb terms that means to publish content on my own site and syndicate it to other platforms. I’ve decided I’m going to discontinue using automation in favor of manually writing posts for each of the platforms I want to post to. I’m doing this for 3…

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  • Glass observations – an update

    One year ago I wrote Glass observations, a post wherein I wrote about the state of sharing photos on the web, and what I thought about the photo sharing app Glass. This morning I read that post anew to see if my opinion still stands – it does. So if you missed it and were…

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  • My social media bacta tank is working

    For context, you may want to read my post from early January I am quitting social media. There were two main actions I took when I decided to pull the plug on social media. First, I unsubscribed from all accounts in every platform. RSS feeds deleted. Twitter follows razed. Instagram follows flushed. YouTube subscriptions obliterated.…

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  • WSJ investigates TikTok’s algorithm

    WSJ: The Wall Street Journal created dozens of automated accounts that watched hundreds of thousands of videos to reveal how the social network knows you so well All popular social media platforms are willing to do everything they possibly can to exploit people’s deepest feelings. Facebook is likely the worst actor insomuch as they are…

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  • Craig Mod on using social networks for their strengths

    Craig Mod, in a footnote of the post announcing his newsletter Huh: So my general philosophy of these social networks is to lean into what they do well — a bit of distribution, a bit of playfulness — and don’t kill yourself trying to make them do things for which they aren’t designed. I am angry…

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  • Marcus Peddle on Flickr

    Marcus Peddle: Creating portfolio pages is a hassle on WordPress even though there are a number of photography templates. Adding photos is time consuming and I am rarely happy with the layout. Making albums and browsing on Flickr, however, is easy. I can make an album in just a couple of minutes and the layout…

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  • Gabz on Instagram

    Luis Gabriel Santiago Alvarado, aka Gabz: The main reason I keep Instagram is the same reason most people won’t quit Facebook, I have friends and family I want to stay in contact with. Somehow Instagram seems to be the less Facebooky way of doing it, or at least in my head it is. I feel…

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  • I do not like Reels

    Instagram has been the place that Facebook jams all of its cloned-app-features into for the last few years. When it copied Snapchat it jammed all of the features into Instagram. And now, as it clones TikTok, it is jamming those features into Instagram as well. The Snapchat-like features are easy enough to ignore if you…

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  • Microsoft in talks to buy TikTok

    Microsoft: This new structure would build on the experience TikTok users currently love, while adding world-class security, privacy, and digital safety protections. The operating model for the service would be built to ensure transparency to users as well as appropriate security oversight by governments in these countries. I cannot tell if this is a bad…

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  • The Best of 2019 as told by me

    At the end of the year I like to sit down and make a rather random list of the “best” things I’ve seen that year. I do this almost entirely from memory but I also peruse my browser history and look through my Unmark archive in order to uncover some of the things I appreciated…

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  • Twitter Lists are having a moment

    Twitter recently released an updated UI that allows you to “pin” Lists you’ve created to your Home timeline view. This makes it possible to swipe between each List quickly. It is a nice feature – especially for those with only a few lists or for those just starting out with them*. Since this update was…

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  • What I saw this week #58: March 22, 2019

    Here are some things I’ve seen recently:

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  • Twitter isn’t going anywhere

    Stephen Hackett, at 512 Pixels: Regardless of all of that, I think it’s clear the leadership at Twitter has no idea what they are doing, and I think the network’s time is ticking away faster than ever. Not to be contrarian but I disagree. Update January 24, 2019: I must have misread Hackett’s post. I…

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  • Is Instagram about to plummet?

    When Instagram first started to hit popularity – long after their failed attempt at being a check-in service – the app was all about photo filters. Anyone could snap a photo with their phone and quickly add a filter to make it look “better” or at least more interesting. It made everyone feel like a…

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  • RSS is not dead. Subscribing is alive.

    Sinclair Target, writing for Motherboard: Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was. This isn’t the first nor the last article to cover the creation of the RSS standard, its rise to relative popularity with Google Reader, and its subsequent fall from popularity. But the big…

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  • Matt Haughey and I disagree about Instagram Stories

    Matt Haughey, on this blog: Instagram stories feel like work, like being forced to watch ads from my friends’ lives instead of casually browse stuff at my own pace. The feed: I can just scroll through quickly, and stop on interesting photos, but Stories slow down the whole process of popping into Instagram for just…

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  • Systrom and Krieger resign from Instagram

    Kevin Systrom, former CEO and co-founder of Instagram: We’ve grown from 13 people to over a thousand with offices around the world, all while building products used and loved by a community of over one billion. What a run! Talk about leaving while on top. A Seinfeld-esque move.

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  • Leo Laporte leaves Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook

    Leo Laporte: Yesterday I deactivated my Twitter account and kicked Tumblr to the curb. A couple of weeks ago I did the same with Instagram. A month or so before that I killed Facebook. And I survived. No, thrived! I had deleted my Twitter account in the past and lived. And while I haven’t deleted…

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  • What I would write about Vero

    Colin Walker wrote his hot take on Vero and it is exactly what I would have written (only his post is far more eloquent than mine would have been). Go read the entire post but here are a few highlights. As soon as I saw what Vero was all about – the idea it “makes…

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  • Fred Wilson on owning your content

    Fred Wilson: I would never outsource my content to some third party. I blog on my own domain using open source software (WordPress) that I run on a shared server that I can move if I want to. It is a bit of work to set this up but the benefits you get are enormous.…

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  • Richard MacManus’s tech predictions

    Richard MacManus attempts to predict some things for 2018: We’ll finally get a killer app for AR in 2018. Maybe hope springs eternal, but I’d love to see an AR app with real utility – not just a game like Pokemon Go. I suppose it matters how you define "killer app". For me a killer…

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  • Best of 2017 as told by me

    To create this list I sat down and wrote from the top of my head the things I could remember being awesome in 2017. The list isn’t exhaustive. It is just what made an impression on me as being "the best" in each category. Best Blog: fuzzy notepad Evee consistently writes well-researched, readable, diatribes on…

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  • Repost: Nitin Khanna re: Instagram hashtags

    👉 Nitin Khanna: I am LOVING Instagram’s new hashtag follow feature! It makes perfect sense and makes my feed that much more interesting! Now if only other social networks understood this simple idea.

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  • Follow Hashtags on Instagram

    Instagram: Today we’re introducing the ability to follow hashtags, giving you new ways to discover photos, videos and people on Instagram. Now it’s even easier to stay connected with the interests, hobbies, passions and communities you care about. This is an excellent feature. I won’t even go into all the ways Twitter should have been…

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  • What comes after Instagram?

    Victoria Wright on Twitter: Photo friends// are you regularly sharing your work somewhere other than on @instagram? I’m so over them deciding what I see and don’t see The thread is interesting. Most photogs point to VSCO. I think Instagram still has a long runway ahead of it. And I still think it is very,…

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  • Regram

    Matt Navarra for The Next Web: Instagram appears to be finally working on a native Regram button. It’s a feature many users have been waiting for for some time. Currently, users wanting to reshare content have to either save the image or video to their device and re-share it from their own account, or call…

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  • Recent grams

    I’m trying my hand at Instagram again. This time I’ve created my own filter using Snapseed which I’ve named ColinGram2018. I’m taking some photos I’ve published here and re-editing them with some cropping, blurring, and using ColinGram2018 and then publishing them on the gram. Here are a few example images I’ve posted so far.

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  • Independent interviews Mike Krieger of Instagram

    Adrian Weckler interviewed Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, for Independent.ie out of Dublin. Regarding longer form video Krieger replies: What we have right now is a minute. If we introduce longer video, we have to make it fit into the flow of Instagram in a way that makes sense. I think what might point the…

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  • Share Instagram Stories via Direct Message

    Instagram: Starting today, you can share stories with your friends in Direct. This is a meaningful update. Stories sucked a lot of the activity out of the feed. Being able to share Stories you find – whether they are about a place, event, an interest, a celebrity, or from a friend – means that a…

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  • Multiple photos and videos in a single post on Instagram

    Instagram: With this update, you no longer have to choose the single best photo or video from an experience you want to remember. Now, you can combine up to 10 photos and videos in one post and swipe through to see them all. Fantastic update and finally one that is different than most, if not…

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  • Live streaming video, by the numbers

    Dan Kimbrough: Facebook makes sense as the leader. More people use Facebook than YouTube. And by that, I mean we consume a lot on YouTube, most of its traffic is viewing videos, not creating. I think that most companies and influencers have a big enough audience that they can stream anywhere and their followers will…follow.…

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  • Josh Ginter on Instagram pressure

    Josh Ginter re: my Instagram pressure post: I tried to fix this by unfollowing just about everyone I know personally and following as many talented photographers as I could find. The result of that decision: enormous inspiration to get out of the house and travel, but also to a confidence-shattering reflection on my own photos.…

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  • Chris Aldrich on Instagram pressure

    Chris Aldrich: While in some sense I do miss the beautiful Instagram feeds of yore when it was mostly professionals, it’s more interesting now with friends who use it to capture small snippets of their lives. It seems he has had the opposite experience to the one I mentioned in my previous post; that it…

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  • Instagram pressure

    Kevin Weil, Instagram’s head of product, within a piece by Kurt Wagner for Recode regarding Instagram: “It became a place where people kept raising the bar on themselves in terms of the quality of what they had to achieve to post,” explained Kevin Weil, Instagram’s head of product, who has been working to fix this…

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  • The slow web and POSSE

    David Mead: This year all of my posts, replies, and retweets on Twitter will be coming from this blog and not using the Twitter app (#OwnYourData). That probably means doing it at the end of the day. I’m hoping that will make them more considered (something we may all want to be in the coming…

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  • Thomasz Furmanek, Kayaker, Instagrammer

    I’ve been following Thomasz Furmanek on Instagram for a few years already (right around the time I got my first kayak, the Oru Kayak, which is the same one Furmanek uses). I liked this bit in his photographic interview with Daily Mail: The kayak enables me to travel to remote places and show people these places…

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  • Instagram’s new look

    Ian Spalter, Head of Design at Instagram, on Medium: The evolution of the community has been inspiring, and we hope that we’ve captured some of the life, creativity, and optimism people bring to Instagram every day. Our hope is that people will see this app icon as a new creative spark — something to have fun with…

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