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
Garry Kasparov said,
The stock market and the gridiron and the battlefield aren’t as tidy as the chessboard, but in all of them, a single, simple rule holds true: make good decisions and you’ll succeed; make bad ones and you’ll fail.
It is that simple. Stop your immediate human reaction of searching for qualifiers to reject this statement. That is your ego.
Sometimes a decision seems good at the time and turns out to be bad. So define decisions as good or bad based on ultimate outcome, not on present circumstances. This leaves less room for excuses. But Kasparov’s logic is not about ego, it’s formulaic. We only read into it from an ego perspective when we have failed.
You have to operationally define good and bad for yourself. If you don’t consider it failure to make decisions that seem good at the time but are bad in the end, you will be forgiving of yourself and others forever. It is the sting of a really bad decision that incites true investment in making the next right decision at the moment with what information is available. It makes you look harder for the answer. Otherwise, you never fail; you are a victim of circumstance. Nothing is risked. Material may be gained, but the outcome of the game cannot be interpreted as anything but a loss, strictly speaking.
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.
If humanity incarnate struck a pose, its better side would be technology and marketing.
M.C. Escher- "Eye" 1946
We each have limited bandwidth for consuming content. Some people focus on current events, some on specific political issues, some on celebrity gossip, and others on the ins and outs of Facebook marketing, SEO, and celebrities like Steve Jobs, Joe Jaffe, and Chris Brogan. I hone in on the latter; on digital marketing, technology, and consumer psychology. Here’s why it’s a better area on which to focus your limited attention and free time than the general news:
1. It’s less depressing.
Innovation moves us forward. It inspires progressive thinking. It improves the quality of life. Competition propels business in the free market. Marketing tries to master this and sell it.
2. It’s pleasantly unpredictable.
Yesterday (9/14/11), theatlantic.com published How Our Predictions for the 9/11 Decade Panned Out, a follow-up to Richard Clarke’s 2004 piece for the January/February 2005 Atlantic predicting what the world would be like ten years after September 11, 2001.
The most notable predictions were:
4. GDP Plunges and National Unemployment Skyrockets
7. Dissatisfaction with Politics Gives Rise to An Influential Third Party
Richard Clarke probably based his predictions on the outcomes of comparable historical events. In business and technology, the annual trend predictions every January are often prefaced with caveats. It’s hard to peg what the future holds and the Internet is written in ink. But in politics and history, prediction becomes easier as time passes and history repeats itself. Interpersonal and global affairs are both still rooted in universal human habits and traits. We enact the most familiar archetypal story time and again. The driving forces behind war, crime, and conflict do not change; they manifest in new ways. On the other hand, technology develops on a different trajectory, more vertical in nature. It’s more fun to follow. It has the potential to surprise you. Tunnel vision upon gadgets, podcasts, and completely meta Twitter debate over viral marketing campaigns is more flattering for our camera face.
PC Mag’s July 2011 poll indicated that user dissatisfaction with Facebook is at such an all-time high that up to 50% might be willing to abandon the social network.
I read a thoughtful statement regarding this on Social Media Today by David Amerland: “Loyalty is a myth. Like banks and supermarket chains discovered in real life, the public is notoriously fickle, using whichever service gives them the most of what they want in a particular moment in time.”
Brand loyalty is more tenuous than loyalty to a social network. Granted, Facebook is a brand, but in a different way than Crest or Tiffany is. If anything, the high disapproval ratings of Facebook for its privacy policy and other flaws suggest that people use it because it has a monopoly, it’s all they know, and it’s convenient since everyone else is there. That’s a recipe for losing market share.
Force of Habit
Assuming that because Facebook has 750 million users, it will remain ubiquitous is naive. Plenty of widespread, hugely popular, go-to platforms have been abandoned en masse for the BBD (Bigger Better Deal). As Chris Brogan said on Six Pixels of Separation episode 262 when Mitch Joel asked if people would port to a new platform, “Two words: Cassette tapes…. There’s a new format in town. You kind of adapt or you find yourself saying “Wow how come nobody’s in my top 8 on Myspace?”
I don’t see Facebook going away yet, but Google+ will infiltrate Facebook’s market share over the next couple years. When Google+ incorporates businesses and brands, it will explode, as long as beta maintains such high growth.
Search
Content you post to Google+ is search-friendly. If you are promoting a brand (your personal brand most likely at this point), every Google Plus update has the potential to put helpful notches into your SEO belt. Since search is increasingly social search, status updates on a search-friendly network will be more valuable than those on Facebook.
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.
