👓 Instagram import in Micro.blog | Manton Reece

Read Instagram import in Micro.blog by Manton Reece (manton.org)
Micro.blog for Mac version 1.3 is now available. It features a brand new import feature for uploading an archive of Instagram photos to your blog.
This is an awesome development. I do wish it wasn’t so MacOS-centric, but hopefully its one of many export/import tools that shows up to improve peoples’ ownership and portability of their data.

👓 PopSugar Stole Influencers’ Instagrams — Along With Their Profits | Racked

Read PopSugar Stole Influencers’ Instagrams — Along With Their Profits (Racked)
The lifestyle website stripped bloggers’ affiliate links from their posts and added the site’s own.
h/t Kimberly Hirsch

See also notes at stream.boffosocko.com.

👓 Real People Are Turning Their Accounts Into Bots On Instagram — And Cashing In | BuzzFeed

Read Real People Are Turning Their Accounts Into Bots On Instagram — And Cashing In by Alex Kantrowitz (BuzzFeed)
Verified accounts turning themselves into bots, millions of fake likes and comments, a dirty world of engagement trading inside Telegram groups. Welcome to the secret underbelly of Instagram.
Eventually there will be so much noise on these platforms that they will cease to have any meaning for the business purposes that people are intending to use them for.

Worse, they’re giving away their login credentials to outsiders to do this.

👓 All my Instagrams are MINE | Spitot Design

Read All my Instagrams are MINE by Bryan Hoffman (Spigot Design)
There was a time in the early days of social media that I signed up for every service that came out. The username @spigot is mine across most services you can find. By the time Instagram started, I’d started to grow weary and standoffish to new services. I’m sure you know what I mean. So I held ...

👓 Changes to Improve Your Instagram Feed | Instagram

I’ve got to think that this may not be the best week for making substantive changes to feeds on Facebook owned companies? This doesn’t seem too terribly intrusive as a change, but it still isn’t the linear ordering I wish they’d go back to.

👓 Meet Vero: Why a billionaire’s Instagram alternative is suddenly so popular | Mashable

Read Meet Vero: Why a billionaire's Instagram alternative is suddenly so popular by Karissa Bell (Mashable)
What you need to know about Vero.
It looks like a very slick app that could replace way more than just Instagram. It’s got bookmarks/links, music, watches for movie/tv, read related posts for books, location, and photos as post kinds in addition to a variety of audiences. If it had broad based status updates and articles…

Of course it’s still early days for it, and all platforms change drastically as they grow without the customer’s real control of them. #justanothersilo

👓 Experiments with Instagram and WordPress | Island in the Net

Read Experiments with Instagram and WordPress by Khürt WilliamsKhürt Williams (islandinthenet.com)
Earlier this year I started using an Adobe Lightroom plugin to export my images directly to Instagram. I also use an Adobe Lightroom to WordPress plugin from Automatt...

Feed reader revolution

The state-of-the-art in feed readers was frozen in place sometime around 2010, if not before. By that time most of the format wars between RSS and Atom had long since died down and were all generally supported. The only new features to be added were simple functionalities like sharing out links from readers to social services like Facebook and Twitter. For fancier readers they also added the ability to share out to services like Evernote, OneNote, Pocket, Instapaper and other social silos or silo related services.

So the real question facing companies with stand alone traditional feed reader products–like Feedly, Digg Reader, The Old Reader, Inoreader, Reeder, NewsBlur, Netvibes, Tiny Tiny RSS, WordPress reader–and the cadre of others is:

  • What features could/should we add?
  • How can we improve?
  • How can we gain new users?
  • How can we increase our market share?

In short the primary question is:

What should a modern RSS feed reader be capable of doing?

Continue reading Feed reader revolution

👓 You can now upload Instagram photos from its mobile website | The Verge

Read You can now upload Instagram photos from its mobile website (The Verge)
Instagram users no longer need the app to upload photos. The company is now rolling out the ability to upload photos through its mobile website. You can’t upload videos, add filters, upload to...

A New Way to “Know and Master Your Social Media Flow”

I was reminded this morning that two years ago yesterday FriendFeed, one of my favorite social media sites, was finally shut down after years of flagging support (outright neglect?) after it was purchased by Facebook.

This reminded me of something which I can only call one of the most hurtful diagrams I saw in the early days Web 2.0 and the so-called social web. It was from an article from May 16, 2009, entitled Know and Master Your Social Media Flow by Louis Gray, a well-known blogger who later joined Google almost two years later to promote Google+.

Here’s a rough facsimile of the diagram as it appeared on his blog (and on several syndicated copies around the web):

Louis Gray’s Social Media Flow Diagram from 2009

His post and this particular diagram were what many were experimenting with at the time, and certainly inspired others to do the same. I know it influenced me a bit, though I always felt it wasn’t quite doing the right thing.

Sadly these diagrams all managed to completely miss the mark. Perhaps it was because everyone was so focused on the shiny new idea of “social” or that toys like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and thousands of others which have now died and gone away were so engaging.

The sad part in searching for new ways to interact was that the most important piece of the puzzle is right there in his original diagram. No, it’s not the sorely missed FriendFeed service represented by the logo in the middle, which has the largest number of arrows pointing into or out of it. It’s not Facebook or Twitter, the companies which now have multi-billion dollar valuations. It’s not even the bright orange icon representing RSS, which many say has been killed–in part because Facebook and Twitter don’t support it anymore. The answer: It’s the two letters LG which represent Louis Gray’s own personal website/blog.

Sadly bloggers, and thousands upon thousands of developers, lost their focus in the years between 2007 and 2009 and the world is much worse off as a result. Instead of focusing on some of the great groundwork that already existed at the time in the blogging space, developers built separate stand-alone massive walled gardens, which while seemingly democratizing the world, also locked their users into silos of content and turned those users into the actual product to monetize them. (Perhaps this is the real version of Soylent Green?) Most people on the internet are now sharecropping for one or more multi-billion dollar companies without thinking about it. Our constant social media addiction now has us catering to the least common denominator, unwittingly promoting “fake news”, making us slower and less thoughtful, and it’s also managing to slowly murder thoughtful and well-researched journalism. Like sugar, fat, and salt, we’re genetically programmed to be addicted, and just like the effect they have on us, we’re slowly dying as a result.

The new diagram for 2017

Fortunately, unlike for salt, fat, and sugar, we don’t need to rely on simple restraint, the diet of the week, or snakeoil to fix the problem. We can do what Louis Gray should have done long ago: put ourselves, our identities, and our web presences at the center of the diagram and, if necessary, draw any and ALL of the arrows pointing out of our own sites. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, FourSquare/Swarm, etc. can all still be there on our diagrams, but the arrows pointing to them should all originate from our own site. Any arrows starting with those same social networks should ALL point (only) back to our sites.

This is how I always wanted my online diagram to look:

This is how I always thought that the diagram should have been drawn since before 2009. Now it can be a reality. POSSE definition. Backfeed definition.

How can I do this?

In the past few years, slowly, but surely, I’ve managed to use my own website to create my diagram just like this. Now you can too.

A handful of bright engineers have created some open standards that more easily allow for any website to talk to or reply to any other website. Back in January a new W3C recommendation was made for a specification called Webmention. By supporting outgoing webmentions, one’s website can put a link to another site’s page or post in it and that URL serves the same function as an @mention on services like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Google+, Instagram, etc. The difference here is that these mentions aren’t stuck inside a walled garden anymore, they can reach outside and notify anyone anywhere on the web that they’ve been mentioned. Further, it’s easy for these mentions to be received by a site and be posted as comments on that mentioned page. Because the spec is open and not controlled by a third party corporation, anyone anywhere can use it.

What does this mean? It means I can post to my own site and if you want to write a comment, bookmark it, like it, or almost anything else, you post that to your own website and mine has the option of receiving it and displaying it. Why write your well thought out reply on my blog in hopes that it always lives there when you can own your own copy that, though I can delete from my site, doesn’t make it go away from yours. This gives me control and agency over my own platform and it gives you ownership and agency over yours.

Where can I get it?

Impatient and can’t wait? Get started here.

More and more platforms are beginning to support this open protocol, so chances are it may already be available to you. If you’re using an open source platform like WordPress.org, you can download a plugin and click “activate”. If you want to take few additional steps to customize it there’s some additional documentation and help. Other CMSes like Known have it built in right out of the box. Check here to see if your CMS or platform is supported. Don’t see your platform listed? Reach out to the developers or company and ask them to support it.

If you’re a developer and have the ability, you can easily build it right into your own CMS or platform of choice (with many pre-existing examples to model off if you need them) and there are lots of tools and test suites built which will let you test your set up.

If you need help, there are people all over the world who have already implemented it who can help you out. Just join the indieweb in your favorite chat client option.

Some parting thoughts

Let’s go back to Louis Gray’s blog and check on something. (Note that my intention isn’t to pick on or shame Mr. Gray at all as he’s done some excellent work over the years and I admire it a lot, he just serves as a good public example, particularly as he was recruited into Google to promote and launch G+.)

Number of posts by year on Louis Gray’s personal blog.

If you look at his number of posts over time (in the right sidebar of his homepage), you’ll see he was averaging about 500+ posts a year until about the time of his diagram. That number then drops off precipitously to 7 and 5 in 2015 and 2016 respectively!! While life has its vagaries and he’s changed jobs and got kids, I seriously doubt the massive fall off in posts to his blog was because he quit interacting online. I’ll bet he just moved all of that content and all of his value into other services which he doesn’t really own and doesn’t have direct control over.

One might think that after the demise of FriendFeed (the cog at the center of his online presence) not to mention all the other services that have also disappeared, he would have learned his lesson. Even browsing back into his Twitter archive becomes a useless exercise because the vast majority of the links on his tweets are dead and no longer resolve because the services that made them died ignominious deaths. If he had done it all on his own website, I almost guarantee they’d still resolve today and all of that time he spent making them would be making the world a richer and brighter place today. I spent more than twenty minutes or so doing a variety of complicated searches to even dig up the original post (whose original URL had moved in the erstwhile) much less the original diagram which isn’t even linked to the new URL’s post.

 

Reading my Facebook and Instagram Streams again via RSS

I’ve really been loving reading my Facebook and Instagram streams on my own website using Ryan Barrett’s versions of Facebook Atom and Instagram Atom webapps.

Twitter is coming next, but I need to tweak some lists to pare things down.

This feels so 2008, and I mean that in the best way.

Instagram Single Photo Bookmarklet

Ever wanted a simple and quick way to extract the primary details from an Instagram photo to put it on your own website?

The following javascript-based bookmarklet is courtesy of Tantek Çelik as an Indieweb tool he built at IndieWebCamp NYC2:

If you view a single photo permalink page, the following bookmarklet will extract the permalink (trimmed), photo jpg URL, and photo caption and copy them into a text note, suitable for posting as a photo that’s auto-linked:

javascript:n=document.images.length-1;s=document.images[n].src;s=s.split('?');s=s[0];u=document.location.toString().substring(0,39);prompt('Choose "Copy ⌘C" to copy photo post:',s+' '+u+'\n'+document.images[n].alt.toString().replace(RegExp(/\.\n(\.\n)+/),'\n'))

Any questions, let me know! –Tantek

If you want an easy drag-and-drop version, just drag the button below into your browser’s bookmark bar.

✁ Instagram

Editor’s note: Though we’ll try to keep the code in this bookmarklet updated, the most recent version can be found on the Indieweb wiki thought the link above.