Instagram != Flickr + Snapseed

Posted on December 30, 2012 by manima

The question has been lingering in the back of my mind for a while now, “Am I really getting anything out of Instagram?”

When I first joined, Instagram solved a problem — it was a fast, fun, and unique way to share photographs across a number of services. Anything I shot while mobile had the opportunity to be instantly shared to Twitter or Facebook, backed up to Flickr, and have the appeal of applied filters (something I'd been accomplishing via Photoshop and CameraBag respectively). I immediately dubbed it “the app Flickr should've built” after my first upload, but then retracted that assessment when I got a closer look at the cost in quality/resolution on the Instagram side.

Last year in February I ran a comparison of Instagram and Picplz and likened the two companies to the battle that was emerging between Facebook and Flickr over photosharing dominance. It's funny how that turned out, Instagram later sold to Facebook for piles of cash, and Picplz shut down. In many ways, Picplz launched an app similar to the existing Flickr product, with a few standouts — filters and the ability to toggle applied filters on/off post-publishing.

A lot has changed since then. I never gave up on Flickr being the place my photos are stored, however the community activity has waned a bit. The good news is, Yahoo! appears to be putting more wood behind the Flickr arrow in the new Marissa Mayer regime. The 2.0 app is a revelation — not perfect, but a damn solid step in the right direction. If you can do it on the Flickr site, you can do it in the app…and it's snappy as all hell. Filters have been added, although that's not the important piece of the puzzle. What matters is that the community infrastructure is still intact. The wood isn't completely rotted, it's just a little more vacant these days. That's not a bad thing.

I've been playing around with the new app in combination with Snapseed (full disclosure: I work for Google and they own Nik Software), and I find the pairing to be quite ideal. I have been favoriting photos, commenting, and uploading on the go since the launch of the app, and slowly others appear to be resurfacing as well.

So what solution does Instagram serve now? Nothing. Are there people there? Sure. I just don't know that I need to be there too. I'm increasingly more wary of the direction they will be heading in the future, so why stress about it? I have all the control I need on Flickr, and the Pro membership isn't unreasonable to ask for in trade-off.

Here is what I plan to upload as my final post on Instagram:

I'm not sure if I'll completely remove my account and all of my photos, but I will slowly delete photos of my kids and my home over time. I have them backed up elsewhere, so I don't see a need to keep them there considering the loose soil of the Instagram/Facebook TOS. For what it's worth, I've taken a hard line against uploading to Facebook as well. I guess this is the natural evolution of things, and I've decided to keep my eggs in the Flickr basket for now.

Posted with Blogsy

Seriously. @twittersuggests is a White Hot Bucket of Fail. Er, Win. Gah! I Don’t Even Know Anymore

Posted on August 31, 2011 by manima

I first noticed the new experimental @twittersuggests feature a couple months ago when it @mentioned me in a tweet to a newly registered Twitter user. At the time I thought this was a cool way for the company to actively use their own product to help solve a discovery problem for new users to the service. My Twitter account was included in a series of tweets that mentioned other notable accounts (@superamit, @juliebenz, and @sacca), so the secondary reaction was a positive emotional one — I was flattered.

Twitter describes the service on its help pages as:

…an experimental feature that helps you find interesting new accounts to follow by tweeting Who To Follow suggestions, personalized just for you! This feature was created by Twitter, and it looks like a normal Twitter account – it will Tweet recommendations which you can reply to, retweet or mark as favorites.

Pretty cool, right?

Since then not every mention has been as flattering (obviously, the purpose of this service isn’t to dole out flattery to nobodies like myself), but for the most part they have been decent overall. Over time, the quality of the mentions declined. Today tipped the scale. In a tweet posted earlier I was @mentioned alongside what can only be described as a spam account. Nay, a porn spam account. See for yourself:

So, I may be guilty for tweeting a lot. I may also be guilty for running my mouth off from time to time. But how in the world am I in the same class as a porn spam account? Better yet, how can this possibly be acceptable from an official Twitter account?

How does it work?

@twittersuggests is a feature which looks like a Twitter account – it algorithmically generates suggestions of users to follow and sends them to you.

@twittersuggests will tweet recommendations to you via @mentions, and this Tweet will appear in your @mentions timeline.

Sure, the company describes this with words like “algorithmically” and “experimental,” but it’s really hard to believe that this was launched with any sort of testing whatsoever. If there are any resources applied to this experiment, they certainly don’t appear to be doing any tuning that is having a positive impact. To the contrary, the quality appears to be decreasing over time. The sad thing is, if I were new to Twitter I might find a service like this valuable if the accounts recommended remained of decent quality, but that’s just not the case here. Worse still is that there are so many simple ways this could be avoided.

Before I get pummeled with the argument the “false positives are expensive” argument (Yes, I’ve read @kellan’s excellent write-up, and have firsthand experience with this as well) let me call out that this is an entirely different scenario. The cost of false positives is only applicable when you choose to deny accounts access to basic services. If a company restricts an account from using the basic functionality of a site because of an unsubstantiated suspicion, then sure…that’s expensive.

However, tweeting account recommendations that might otherwise trip overly sensitive spam-detecting algorithms is a ~~choice~~ mistake. Twitter owns this account, they have the right to be overly choosy about the accounts featured in their recommendations, and an account that includes obvious keywords like “sex” and “porn” is a safe one to filter out of that list, just to play it safe. Now, building a recommendations engine is tough. It’s not easy to get these things right, and I’m certainly sympathetic to this. I guess I’m reacting so strongly here because this feels like one of those avoidable mistakes, especially because there is literally no harm in restricting an account like this from being recommended.

In other news…

Speaking of mouthing off…I shared my thoughts on the news of the Beyonce-pregnancy-VMA induced milestone Twitter reached in terms of TPS (FYI — that’s, obnoxiously, “tweets per second”) this weekend, and look what happened. Awesomesauce.

Which is the App Flickr Should’ve Built?

Posted on February 10, 2011 by manima

Neither. That is to say, yet.

After playing with Instagram for a few days I was absolutely hooked. I even went so far to declare at the time that, “Instagram is the iPhone app Flickr should’ve built.” This was back when the app first launched. I was close, but I was wrong.

Recently I gave Picplz a go after reading a bit more about their product, and my initial assessment was…well, let’s let the tweets speak for themselves:

By the way, massive kudos to @picplz for the quick responses. Well done.

“really s-l-o-w.” What does that mean? You can only do so much in 140 characters, but I tried to sum it up as best I could. The gist was this, Picplz acted like a nice utility app for uploading and sharing photos, but it wasn’t very sticky. Was I being unfair? After all, I only tried out posting one photo, and the social graph on Picplz is still very small.

At any rate, I stood by this assessment until a few follow notifications began trickling in. One morning while on the train I received three follows and decided it was time to give Picplz another look.

I snapped another photo, uploaded and shared, and still felt like the app was slow. But the conclusion I reached that morning on the train was, “Sure, Picplz isn’t quite there yet, but neither is Instagram.”

That’s right. I said it. I’ve been a staunch supporter of Instagram, but things change.

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The Boardwalk has a New Home!

Posted on September 13, 2010 by manima

For Sale: My Bianchi Boardwalk, originally uploaded by marioanima.

I’m finally taking the plunge and upgrading to a full on road bike. I’ve got my heart set on a beautiful new 2011 Bianchi Imola (in celeste!), and I’m placing my order this week with the good folks over at La Dolce Velo. Here’s a rather grainy shot of a 61 on the sale floor:

I fell in love., originally uploaded by marioanima.

So I posted an ad on Craigslist and the replies started filing in. Here’s the problem — I love this bike. Even though I know that it’s time to move on, I still wanted to find a good home for the bike. It wasn’t just about selling it off to make room for a replacement. I decided to link to the ad on Twitter and Facebook, just to see if anyone I know would be interested. Worth a shot, right?

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Edgar Wright Sent Me a DM

Posted on September 12, 2010 by manima

We went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World again today, and before the film began I tweeted about it, cc’ing Edgar Wright (the director) alongside a mention that the theater was nearly full.

Upon emerging from the theater I found this DM notification on my phone.

Yes, I’m geeking out a little bit…I mean, c’mon?! The director of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz messaged me!

The whole day sort of came together on a whim. Over a bowl of pho at lunch I mentioned to Dee that I’ve been wanting to watch Scott Pilgrim vs. The World a second time — in part because I really loved the film, but also as a show of support for something I wish would’ve gotten a fairer shake at the box office.

So we decided to do it.

While waiting for the film to start, I thought it would be fun to let Edgar know that I was watching the film again. Sort of a geeky attempt at showing solidarity via Twitter. I never expected a response, but it sure was cool to see that my tweet registered with him. If you haven’t watched the film yet, or even if you have, why not check it out (again)?

And speaking of films to check out, you may have noticed H.P. Mendoza‘s Twitter handle and a mention of Fruit Fly in that exchange of tweets. If you haven’t checked out Fruit Fly or Colma, do yourself a favor. And Edgar Wright, if you happen to be reading this make sure to add Fruit Fly to your DVD/Blu-Ray queue when it comes out…I’d love to hear what you think of it.

OK, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Apple’s Ping: A Broken Social Scene?

Posted on September 3, 2010 by manima

I’m a big fan of Last.fm, but I’ll admit that music-based social networks haven’t completely nailed it yet. Part of the problem lies in the lack of problem-solving for the user. Last.fm gets halfway there, in that it is a simple way to catalog listening behavior into a social profile. It loses in the sense that it is so passive that most people forget to engage. Or if you’re like me, you go whole months without realizing that your scrobbling has lapsed.

Not good.

I’ve never been keen on subscription models for music, although I never thought I’d be keen on a subscription model for movies, yet I’ve been a Netflix member since the beginning. So, I suppose there is room for convincing. That said, the proposition of a cloud based music library bolted to a social network is extremely compelling. When Ping was announced, this was the very first thing that came to mind — the promise of what this thing could become if allowed to grow in the right directions, oh the possibilities!

Imagine my dismay when finding that Ping does offer that very promise, yet fumbles on a few of the basics along the way. Specifically, interaction design around social activity. Yes, a company like Apple can produce iPhone after iPhone with an industry changing UX, yet they seemed to have dropped the ball on some very simple things. Before I dive in, let me preface that all of this is easily correctable, and I suspect we’ll see most of these issues addressed in future updates.

Here goes:

1. The Lonely Island

Joining Ping is an extremely lonely experience. Sure, Apple makes some follower recommendations right off the bat, but they aren’t particularly good ones. To be fair, a network that requires activation like Ping is bound to have limitations in the “People We Recommend You Follow” department, so Apple is wise to offer up recommended artists to follow. Yet, it still chalks up to a miss, and here’s why: I’ve never listened to an MP3 from any of the artists Ping recommends via iTunes. They have my listening data, they have my library, and they already scrape both of these for Genius recommendations, so chances are these are the closest matches they could muster. But some of them are so completely off base that it left me scratching my head.

Browsing deeper into the recommendations revealed another off-putting issue: The recommendations sometimes duplicate, which throws off the count. That means I see the opportunity to browse through 16 recommendations, only to find out that I’m actually offered 14, and the duplicates don’t even match my musical preferences. What does this say? Right off the bat, this gives me the feeling that I won’t find anything of interest for me here from an artist perspective. But that’s OK, I would be happy enough just to connect with friends and share music likes and dislikes. Ping leads with this call to action, but it isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do. To make matters worse, your option to search in iTunes or Ping doesn’t really offer a remedy, but more on that in a bit.

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