Many Instagramers have a burning question:
If I like then unlike a photo, will the user who posted the photo know?
This is a follow-up to my Instagram Privacy Tips and FAQ post, which received many excellent questions. The answer to this like/unlike mystery is worthy of its own post because it deals with the concepts of push (notification outside of the app) versus pull (user activity/refreshes within the app).
Can the other user tell I liked their photo if I unlike it afterward?
Scenarios:
- Recipient has push notifications on (regardless of IG app running or not): like notification received
- Recipient has push notifications off and IG app actively in use: like notification received
- Recipient has push notifications off and IG app open but not actively in use: like notification not received
- Recipient has push notifications off and IG app not open: like notification not received
I reveal the mysteries of Instagram‘s inner workings. Some nuances to privacy settings are unclear on Instagram Help, so let’s shed some light. Skip to ii. Privacy below if you know enough about account management and third party Instagram websites.
i. Instagram FAQ
1. Can I have multiple usernames?
Yes. Each must be associated with a different email address.
2. Can I toggle between my usernames on the iPhone app?
No, you have to log out and log in to switch your profile. Here are tips on using Dropbox and Fotogramme to make toggling less painful.
3. Can I see Instagram pictures online?
Yes. Some are directly uploaded to Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous etc. But if a user simply tweets a link to the IG picture, you can see it by clicking the link (or in twitter.com’s native display). However, you won’t be able to login and Like or comment. To do this:
4. Can I Like and comment Instagram pictures online while being logged into and able to manage my IG account?
Yes. For this, I like statigr.am best. There are several other third party Instagram services. This post covers the top 10, however I’ll leave out the cat-related and meaningless competition-based ones in my list.These are the other two sites with functionality closest to the Instagram iPhone app:
A. Ink361 (formerly Inkstagram) Login to this web-based version of Instagram. You can do everything you can on the iPhone app except add new pictures.
B. Insta-great Login to see Instagram photos, follow/unfollow users, or to like photos. Filter photos by dates, users, or tags. You can only view one picture in full size at a time.
To see IG photos in a stream or grid, try the web gallery Instagrid.
ii. Privacy Tips
You can block a user. This means that even if they are following you, they will not see your photos in their Instagram feed, nor will your actions (commenting, liking) show up in their News – Following feed. However, they can still see your photos in other ways: If you tweet or post a link to another social network when you share an IG photo, they can click it and see the photo.
Impress Your Audience
Last week, I had to create a presentation about digital marketing. The thought of slaving over yet another PowerPoint made me cringe. I had heard of Prezi.com, an online zooming presentation creation tool. Although it would take a few hours to really learn Prezi, I decided the investment would pay off when I presented a PowerPoint on steroids.
Prezi
It took me about three hours to learn the ropes of the zoom tools, the frames, the objects, and the paths. I was able to select a theme with colors and fonts, then modify the CSS to use my company’s color codes. The biggest hurdle was breaking out of my longstanding .ppt slide paradigm. I’ll never go back.
Prezi is all Flash and you can import Powerpoint or Keynote slides. On your canvas, a massive grid, add objects and organize them in any array or direction, add visible and hidden frames, and don’t worry about matching sizes of images and fonts. After adding objects, you create a path (progression) by clicking on each unit of text, image, video, or a frame. Click on an object to zoom to it or click the outside of the frame around the object to zoom to the center of the frame.
Insert images, video, live links, .animated gif, YouTube videos, Excel documents, PDFs, and more. If you’re going to present with a projector, TIP: Hold down shift when placing a frame around an object(s). This will automatically size contents in a 4:3 aspect ratio to mitigate distortion. I started in the free account mode but upgraded to the Enjoy package ($59/year) for more features, such as creating private Prezis and inserting my own logo.
Best of all, Prezi is in the cloud. Offline, a downloaded Prezi plays as a movie. However, live links and YouTube videos will not play in offline mode. You can print hard copies, but note that many trees will die because many paths mean more pages.
For ideas, view other Prezis in the Explore section. Here is an official Coke Prezi:
Check out user-generated popular Prezis in the Explore Section. Make a copy of any public Prezi, then work off of that version, editing and adding your own information.
Having the ability to zoom in and out and control the presentation in such a fluid way is great; people will ask questions and instead of flipping back through boring slides, you can just unzoom and zoom back to the desired area. Email and share the Prezi online, it’s iPad friendly, embed it, download it, copy it, and more. Prezi will impress your audience.
In 2007, a reporter asked former Google CEO Eric Schmidt an “easy question:” What is Web 3.0?
After some grumbling about “marketing terms,” Schmidt obliged, saying that, to him, Web 3.0 is all about the simplification and democratization of software development, as people would begin to draw on the tools and data floating around in the Internet “cloud” to cobble together custom applications, which they would then share “virally” with friends and colleagues. -Rough Type, What is Web 3.0?
Web 3.0 Vision
Already in motion, the no longer air-quoted Web 3.0 will be the Internet’s vast data semantically linked to generate a highly efficient, customized user experience. Even physical objects like food containers will have an online address. (We can see early iterations of hardlinking with QR codes right now.) In 2010, farmers began receiving data from cattle transmitting gigabytes of biological and geographical status updates. Your home will become more communicative, with electricity and water usage data sent to the cloud. TripIt will talk to my Brinks Home Security account when I’m on vacation. Don’t be afraid, this is progress. Knowledge is power. AI can be good. The semantic web facilitates machines to understand the meaning of information online.
You will be continuously logged in, not having to re-enter passwords. Sharing with a friend will pull the contextually relevant contacts from your list, aggregating your address book, social network, and suggested second-degree mutual friends.
Today, user-generated content (UGC) not only constitutes an increasing amount of online data; it affects consumer behavior more than advertising does. In April 2011, “people who read customer ratings and reviews for Dell products [were] 138% more likely to make a purchase.” UGC will inform even more information and behavior. However, the format will change skins and become more concise.
We have largely unnetworked, unlinked data. It would be an historically accurate prediction to expect a micro crunch from the exploding conversational and social Web 2.0. But can you envision a trend reversal of the send-happy, prolific publishing of the average Facebook user’s 90 average pieces of monthly content? Google+ indicates a step toward Web 3.0 because it aggregates data and is cloud. Google Plus may seem similar to Facebook, but in key ways is a departure and progression.
We’re going to the cloud and bringing inanimate objects with us. Once there, micro personal status updates will be overshadowed by immense opportunity. On the current trajectory, I predict that this shift will seem like a big bang, but comprise small behavioral crunches. I.e., we will seem to share much more data, but it will be more 0′s and 1′s and less OMGs; more meaningful bytes overtaking 360 billion pieces of mostly banal user-generated content.
Over the last few years, hundreds of millions of ordinary people have become online content creators. The internet used to be a one-way street of consumption (Web 1.0 when advertisers sold to users), but now it’s a conversation where even the most lay users publish and user-generated content (UGC) rules social and consumer activities. (Web version iterations using .0 are a bit silly
As of July 2011 on Facebook:
- Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
- More than 360 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each month
- In 2010, Facebook revenue from user-generated content = $1.860 billion
Social media lends users networked, searchable content megaphones. User empowerment as publishers has become quotidian. Note the great reduction in censures berating the narcissism of content creation. People who still think Twitter is stupid or for alerting folks that you’re driving to work are considered ignorant and are becoming a minority (and that was in 2009).
Image courtesy of science.howstuffworks.com
But let’s not forget that (theoretically) since the beginning of “time,” the universe, earth, and this planet’s inhabitants from large to microscopic have existed and died in a series of bangs and crunches. Expansions and contractions. Even in human birth, the body contracts and expands to expel the new.
Our shared egos and stories, our willingness to accept new fads and to dive head first into change can only hurtle with increasing velocity for so long. Eventually, the asteroid hits and kills the species; the glorious empire falls; the plague wipes out the population. The bang and crunch cycle is macro and it’s micro to the point of imperceptible, compounding tendencies away from the status quo.
The shift won’t be crunchy (instant and dramatic) but more of a slow crinkling, like an irksome moviegoer’s candy wrapper sliding between sticky fingers for the entire film.
In Part 2 of this article, I explore the shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, a semantic linked data network where the Edy’s in my freezer, my Yelp review of a local frozen yogurt joint in Decatur, GA, my Kroger card shopping history, my upcoming Vermont country vacation near a dairy farm, and my recent viewing of an ice cream sandwich recipe on cookinglight.com will work as a team. Believe me, that is really exciting.
Montreal-based clevercupcakes brand links to Montreal Science Center website with edible QR code
QR codes (Quick Response codes) are nothing new. Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave created QR codes in 1994 for vehicle part manufacturers to track equipment. QR Codes are popular in Japan and South Korea but have been slower to catch on in the West. A QR code is a matrix barcode presented by a 2D image of black or colored modules in a square pattern on white background.
Either dedicated QR barcode readers or camera phones can read the images. If you want to read a QR code with your iPhone, you need to download a third party app. I love the potential these things have, and the marketing applications are endless. So why aren’t they ubiquitous in the US yet?
Pros – QR codes:
- Hardlinking (linking to the internet from physical world objects). This is too cool. (Yet it also walks a fine line between nature and e. (Imagine a forest carved into a bird’s-eye view QR code: Thoughts?)
Kylie Minogue’s 2010 All the Lovers music video hardlinked nicely with a QR code which scans to produce the word LOVE:
- Convenience and mobility
- Ability to share a vCard (electronic business card)
After testing several photo apps on iPhone, for sharing my pictures I prefer the free app Instagram. It allows you to take a new photo or use one from your photo album, then apply a filter or keep the original photo’s appearance, and email or share it with any or all of your social networks. When you create an Instagr.am account, you have the option to allow Instagram access to your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, Foursquare, and/or Flickr account. You don’t have to configure any of these services if you just want to post on Instagram alone. Instagram only works with iPhone.
Location
From iPhone’s home screen, you can enable geotagging on Instagram from Settings –> General –> Location Services. When you post a photo, you will have the location option. My demo – please excuse the quality:
It’s a nice way to keep your photos organized and reference them later. Normally, if you post some photos on Facebook or Flickr or Tumblr, you don’t have one aggregate home space where you can view all your posted photos, no matter where you posted them. There’s always your computer or iPhone camera library, but these lack 1) built-in social sharing capabilities; 2) a record of where a photo was posted.
Joseph Jaffe announced he would use a few apps to communicate from a Flip the Funnel session in March:
I’ll be using the following apps to connect, communicate, collaborate, create and other things that start with “c”: (I’m typically there under my real name or jaffejuice)
- Instagram (my tip for breakout year/best in show)
- GroupMe (second place or best newcomer)
- FourSquare
- Yobongo
- Bump
Egyptians protest in central Cairo. Photograph: Khaled El Fiqi/EPA via Guardian UK
Egyptians protest in central Cairo. Photograph: Khaled El Fiqi/EPA via Guardian UK
20th Century Greatness
I’ve had a nascent theory in the back of my mind– maybe more so a gut instinct or fear — that the concentrated collection of destructive events in the last 10-20 years are a result of the pendulum swinging back after the glorious 20th century. It was simply too much, too fast, too good. I’m no historian, but I think the concentration of war and terrorism and environmental disaster from, say, 1985-2005 has been the universe somehow regaining equilibrium.
I recently researched the bubonic plague. The three iterations of the plague killed ~75 million people. Although it was arguably a deadlier and more destructive historic event as a stand-alone, if you add up several more recent terrors (a non-exhaustive list, at that): 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Haiti earthquake, 2007 tsunami, Iraq/Afghanistan wars, SARS/bird flu other biomedical scares — these seem implicitly worse, and eerily more so on a trajectory.
For lack of a better term, the universe may be putting society back in its place; reminding us that Mother Earth’s tsunamis and hurricanes are greater than we; the smoggy planet is angry after our Industrial Revolution. Further, and more importantly for the global marketplace, we are angry at one another after the catapult into a globalized economy. Rapid idea and information dissemination has — despite the trend of political correctness and increasing tolerance for diversity — perhaps increased our animosity toward one another. (Here, I mainly allude to segments of Middle Eastern/developing nations’ rising awareness, jealousy, and resentment of Western values, lifestyle, and politics.) As such, I posit the following: Would Islamic fundamentalists have been inflamed enough to commit 9/11 if the previous century had been less an anomaly of transformative, progressive innovation and invention?
We talk about social media empowering consumers like never before. I love Twitter because it’s the ultimate democratization of information. It’s grittier than meticulous, revised blog entries and methodical Facebook posts.
Facsimile to Egypt
Egyptians protest in central Cairo. Photograph: Khaled El Fiqi/EPA via Guardian UK
Instantaneous access to news didn’t exist 15-20 years ago. Recall that the fall of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Block was mainly due the ability to send fax messages. The Solidarity Movement in Poland primarily communicated via fax because their phones were tapped. Technology has at least lubricated and arguably enabled the new social change.
This January, tens of thousands of protesters mobilized in Egypt to demand an end to authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30 year reign. The protests were organized in part through Twitter and Facebook. TechCrunch reported that Egypt blocked Twitter.com (website and mobile site) in an attempt to subdue the demonstrations.
Selected Egypt tweets from guardian.co.uk:
