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:
... read more Post a comment (0)“We’ve got Social Media covered” is a common (problematic) sentiment among many businesses. Having someone haphazardly post on Facebook is just not enough. However, that’s not to say that hiring an agency beats assigning the task to someone internal. Anything can still go wrong- that is the scary and challenging beauty of where marketing has arrived. There is something to be said for the positive effects of giving employees in an organization a voice about what they know best- their product. I’ve read a few articles lately stressing the importance of reminding everyone on board that they represent their brand in every customer interaction (isn’t that a given?). Alexis Karlin’s post “Are Brands Socially Disconnected” illustrates the point that whether or not you have the sweetest tweeter money can buy, a company is still only as strong as its weakest link. See a related line from poynter.com coverage of recent NY Times elimination of Jennifer Preston’s social media editor position:
“Social media can’t belong to one person; it needs to be part of everyone’s job,” Preston said. “It has to be integrated into the existing editorial process and production process. I’m convinced that’s the only way we’re going to crack the engagement nut.”
Maybe it will take another ten years for SM fluency (operational definition: basic familiarity and proficiency/absence of Twitter xenophobia) to be an assumed prerequisite for being hired, like Outlook or Excel skills are today. 
Granted, even in 2020, what an agency or external SM strategy consultant will provide on top of this general SM literacy should still be, theoretically, expansive and singular. I.e., worthwhile.
Picture this: A mobile, portable device for employees, installed on most employees’ desks (assuming physical office presence is still quotidian in the future). “Installed” is too physical a word. Let’s say projected, beamed, holographically produced when relevant. Everyone follows the company on the future equivalent of Twitter (which will be far more customizable and include secure gateways and a totally evolved hashtag methodology that surpasses even Google’s instant predictive search). People from all departments use this tool to communicate to each other and/or to customers when appropriate. In fact, if you think you can invent this tool now, please contact me about our startup- @emilybinder
The internet is a place where the birth of a single character is eternal. Blessing and curse in concert. Ultimate recorder of civilization- but is it worth the hard drive real estate? How long until we max out the digital space?
Artist credit: Punch Buggies on deviantart.com
How will the earth store our exponentially increasing input of data mixed with blood and dust? The master computers in secret rooms will shrink until near-infinite data is in the expanding cloud. Just as the same matter that is in our water was once in a dinosaur’s body, our text messages, tweets, and energetic outputs will somehow live on in this bionic state of existence into which our baby planet has morphed. This is not a forested plains land of indigenous peoples. This is not an unpolluted crystal sea. This is a greying, littered land of scars, where human action on the earth at large, and human interaction in the microcosm of our increasingly antisocial relationship conversation has departed from anything we could have been programmed for. I might call some of our cultural norms unnatural, but really anything produced on this planet must come from this planet. Skyscrapers are natural, because metals were already here. We simply shaped them, maybe in a likeness of some god.
Ponder this: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” -Ayn Rand
Some Native Americans believe that we store all our experiences in our bones. Assume that the pain body lives inside us, as Eckhart Tolle posits in Be Here Now. Psychology and medicine have repeatedly evidenced psychosomatic illness: your body reflects your mind. More than you realize.
If we are organic human bodies roaming this planet, cell phones in hand, relationships drastically altered as for the way our bones store their effects, their digital marks on each of our individual online clouds, how will that affect the collective unconscious? Has it already changed? Jung?
If Ayn Rand is correct, that “the skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach,” then is the skyline of our digital empire in the cloud equally or comparably splendid? Or is it too confusing in its very essence of lacking tangible metals from a steel mill and sturdy bricks and mortar?
Just wrote a new blog post at Take 2 Digital: Social Oomph for Automating Updates
The post is a quick guide to SocialOomph.com, a Twitter (and other social media) automation service. I’m a big fan of this site, and of course Tweetdeck too, but vow to find some time this month to explore CoTweet and other tips in this great video from John Haydon: Three Twitter Techniques.
I’ve tried Seesmic and Hootsuite when unable to use Tweetdeck and find the former two totally lacking. I like that Hootsuite is in the cloud, but it’s the little things that count. I.e., when I type @, I want the system to pop a window where I can insert followers by typing the first letter(s) of their name. The search box on Hootsuite is also annoying- I much prefer Tweetdeck’s QuickFollow, which allows me to find a user and see their profile and tweets without having to navigate within a tiny popup box. Tweetdeck’s editable search columns are also more user-friendly. As you can tell, I’ve used Hootsuite more than Seesmic. It’s better. Seesmic’s entire layout, color scheme, fonts, and overall feel are just too clunky and grungy somehow. It’s like the WordPress theme Grunge was applied to a Twitter client in an ugly way.
Anyway check out the blog and try out SocialOomph.com.
