Tag: Instagram

👓 Walt Mossberg, Veteran Technology Journalist, Quits Facebook | The New York Times

Read Walt Mossberg, Veteran Technology Journalist, Quits Facebook by Daniel Victor (New York Times)

Mr. Mossberg has spent decades chronicling the privacy implications of Facebook’s policies. On Monday, he opted out.

Walt Mossberg is far from alone in giving up on Facebook. But as a leading technology journalist who has spent decades chronicling the impact of Silicon Valley’s policies, his exit from the social network speaks louder than most.

This is a HUGE silo quit! There are few who watch the technology sector so closely as Walt Mossberg has for the past several decades.

Since it will be gone soon, I’ve archived a copy of his Facebook post.

👓 Instagram’s new profile designs emphasize users instead of their follower count | The Verge

Read Instagram’s new profile designs emphasize users instead of their follower count (The Verge)
IGTV might get its own tab.
Nice to see other services begin to follow some of the lead of micro.blog and it’s more healthy and explicit features.

👓 Hackers Are Stealing Influencer Instagram Accounts By Promising Lucrative Brand Deals | The Atlantic

Read How Hackers Are Stealing High-Profile Instagram Accounts (The Atlantic)
In the Wild West of “influencer” marketing, there are few protections and plenty of easy marks.
Of the multi-billion dollar business and the issues with needing to give away one’s password to be tracked within this field, the real loss here seems to be that Instagram isn’t building infrastructure for their users to take advantage of these opportunities. Even if they were only taking a small fraction of the income for facilitating the market, they’re missing out on hundreds of millions.

It’s not mentioned here, but the fact that there are businesses built around the idea of “link in bio” means that Instagram really isn’t innovating on their platform.

Is Instagram really so deaf to the needs of their userbase?

👓 How to Delete Facebook and Instagram From Your Life Forever | New York Times

Read How to Delete Facebook and Instagram From Your Life Forever by Brian X. ChenBrian X. Chen (nytimes.com)
Lost faith in Facebook and Instagram after data leakages, breaches and too much noise? Here’s a guide to breaking up with the social network and its photo-sharing app for good.
Not as in-depth and informative as I would have expected. I had kind of hoped for more history and background, but this is sort of cut and dried. The fact that there’s an article of this sort in the New York Times does signal a turning point for the quit Facebook movement.

👓 How to Follow Instagram Hashtag and User Feeds Using RSS | Make Use Of

Read How to Follow Instagram Hashtag and User Feeds Using RSS (MakeUseOf)
Instagram itself doesn't provide a way to get RSS feeds for hashtags or users, but you can use a third-party service!
I really wish social sites would re-enable RSS or other feeds. This would be a great boon towards making much better and richer feed readers and related experiences. As it is some readers really just don’t know what to do with some of these feeds the way they’re generated.

👓 Teachers Are Moonlighting As Instagram Influencers To Make Ends Meet | BuzzFeed

Read Meet The “Teacher Instagrammers” Who Moonlight As Influencers To Make Ends Meet (BuzzFeed News)
One teacher in Texas told BuzzFeed News she makes a $50,000 a year, but made over $200,000 in a year through Instagram.

👓 Finally, Good News For Everyone Who Misses This Instagram Feature | refinery29

Read Finally, Good News For Everyone Who Misses This Instagram Feature (refinery29.com)
After over a year of users begging Instagram to bring back the chronological feed, the app is listening and offering a compromise.

👓 Why Some of Instagram’s Biggest Memers Are Locking Their Accounts | The Atlantic

Read Why Some of Instagram's Biggest Memers Are Locking Their Accounts (The Atlantic)
More meme accounts are going private. Their owners say it’s a new way to gain followers on a crowded platform.

👓 Instagram issues | NextScripts

Read Instagram issues by NextScripts.com (NextScripts)
Instagram made some very big changes to authentication process. About 70% of our users are affected by them. Before the changes the process was quite simple: Sometimes Instagram decided that login from SNAP is “unusual” and asked for confirmation. You just had to open Instagram on your phone and...

👓 Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy | The Atlantic

Read Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy (The Atlantic)
Hotels are being forced to figure out how to work with a new class of brand-peddling marketers.
Just because you’ve got the desire to be a social media influencer doesn’t mean you don’t need to treat it like a serious business.

Social platforms have such huge scale now, I’m surprised they don’t crack down on bots and fake accounts so that it’s more transparent what kind of true value accounts actually bring to the table. They could even leave them in the system so they can show to investors that they’re getting the traffic and “engagement”, but they’re throwing away a lot of actual value by not disclosing actual accounts and real engagement by real people (aka potential customers). Bots are second class citizens because other than the veneer of value, they’re really not adding much to the conversation other than a weak form of tummeling.

This makes me wonder if anyone in the social networking space is doing research on bots as tummelers?

👓 Rare hashtags | Matt Maldre

Read Rare hashtags by Matt Maldre (Matt Maldre)
It’s funny to find hashtags on Instagram that are rarely used. When commenting on a photo, I’ll often combine two words together into a hashtag. And then I click on the hashtag to see if there any other photos. Apparently is the first Instagram photo with the hashtag: #comiccompilations in the comments No photo has ever …
Matt makes an interesting point about the ability to use and search some social silos.

👓 Teens Are Abandoning Facebook. For Real This Time. | Slate

Read Teens Are Abandoning Facebook. For Real This Time. (Slate Magazine)
Facebook is no longer the dominant social network among teens, according to Pew’s survey of 743 U.S. residents aged 13 to 17, conducted between March 7 and April 10, 2018. In fact, it’s no longer even in the top three. (A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the survey.)

👓 Invisible asymptotes | Remains of the Day

Read Invisible asymptotes by Eugene Wei (Remains of the Day)
My first job at Amazon was as the first analyst in strategic planning, the forward-looking counterpart to accounting, which records what already happened. We maintained several time horizons for our forward forecasts, from granular monthly forecasts to quarterly and annual forecasts to even five and ten year forecasts for the purposes of fund-raising and, well, strategic planning.
A great long read covering some interesting portions of UX and strategy in the future of social. There are some useful tidbits for the IndieWeb to consider here.

Reply to 50cent tweet about Instagram abuse

Replied to a tweet by 50cent (Twitter)
Why rely on yet another corporation that may do the same? Come join the #IndieWeb!