notes.husk.org

"Instagram has perfected the single unit / social object / photo experience."

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:47:35 +0100

“Instagram has perfected the single unit / social object / photo experience.”

- imagistapp, commenting On (New) Ways of Photographing and Consuming.

[citation needed]

Seriously. Instagram’s image presentation is so devoid of context that it’s laughable. There’s barely any attention paid to location, and none to time (the existence of the latergram tag indicates how poorly that’s handled). Speaking of tags, the presentation of those is also laughable.

I mean, I think I know what (Joshua?) is getting at here, but I really really don’t agree, for all that I accept that Instagram’s capture and upload seems to have set a standard for getting images posted.

Four photos from Ryan Lewis, who posts to Instagram under the...

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 05:58:02 +0000

Four photos from Ryan Lewis, who posts to Instagram under the account name urbanglitch. From his submission to Year of the Glitch:

I have been using the panoramic feature on my iPhone as a tool to create stretched images for a few months.

I wanted my process to be something that I physically had to work at and not just pressing buttons.

Each time I do a panoramic, I have to decide the optimal distance for the shot and path that the subject (in this case, a muni bus) is turning the corner but not coming towards you. The iPhone panoramic feature draws sliver by sliver as you move the camera across the area. As I experimented with the pictures, I was able to find the sweet spot of how to make the buses look stretched.

Instagram photo-rendering issue

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:23:00 +0000

twitterstatus:

Users are experiencing issues with viewing Instagram photos on Twitter. Issues include cropped images. This is due to Instagram disabling its Twitter cards integration, and as a result, photos are being displayed using a pre-cards experience. So, when users click on Tweets with an Instagram link, photos appear cropped.

For some strange reason there’s nothing about this on Instagram’s blog.

instagram: Bhumibol Adulyadej, Thailand’s king and the world’s...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:21:00 +0000

instagram.com/p/S2RatNAyme/#jetzjing

instagram.com/p/S1Sz47KIgQ/#danacha

instagram.com/p/S18zJdHSYr/#yokk_kamonporn

instagram:

Bhumibol Adulyadej, Thailand’s king and the world’s longest-serving head of state, turns 85 years old today. King Bhumibol, also known as Rama IX, has ruled Thailand for more than 66 years, and is a popular figure throughout the country.

Well, yes, I suppose it does look that way, given if you get caught sending text messages that don’t approve of the king, you can get twenty years in prison. Still, good to see Instagram covering corrupt regimes. I’m looking forward to their highlights of photos from North Korea and Bahrain.

On Instagram, gestures, and buttons

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 06:52:44 +0100

joshuanguyen:

Bijan Sabet: Touch gestures

The Instagram guys ditched the requirement for a little button click and replaced it with a big touch friendly gesture. Two taps and bam, a heart pops up and you’re done. Very satisfying.

Hiding important functionality behind gestures may be something that users evolve to learn, but the road there is still long (I was watching some women exclaiming how hard Instagram was to use the other day!)

Is it worth noting here that although you can use double-tap to like, there’s also a “like” button under every photo? It’s possible to imagine the app without it* but it works well as both feedback that the like worked and as an alternative for anyone who hasn’t discovered the gesture yet.

* Even without the indicator of the button changing from “like” to “liked”, you can tell if you’ve liked something by checking if your name is in the list of people who have. That list collapses for photos that are popular, but it’d be possible to work around that by showing something like “blech and 25 others liked this” for those images.

"Features from a handful of alternate Twitters: - the ability to edit a tweet. There are several..."

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 15:47:00 +0100

“

Features from a handful of alternate Twitters:

- the ability to edit a tweet. There are several patterns in community software for handling the “I responded and then you changed what you said” pattern. One of then is versioning. The other is a short window of edits. It’s a question of balancing how much you prefer the conversational integrity vs the benefits of a little hypocrisy to a person’s self expression.

- privacy. I was an early thorn in Twitter’s side about supporting the privacy settings. But honestly it was just always too much work to respond manually to follow requests or to maintain two separate accounts. Per status privacy and per status geo-privacy would go a long way towards changing the nature of what people share on Twitter away from re-publishing Mashable headlines.

”

- Two points from Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s post, App.net and Cargo Culting, which suggests things that the new short message site App.net might want to consider implementing.

Both of the features I’ve picked out are hard. Allowing people to go back and edit data (and metadata) means not only providing a graceful UI, but also breaking the model of storing data once and being able to treat it as read-only. Per-post and per-feature privacy is also, obviously, pretty tricky, both in UI terms, and in the model of interactions that start happening. (If Eve is a friend and Brenda is family, when Anna posts a photo that’s friends and family but with location locked to family only, there’s lots of combinations to check.)

Of course, just because they’re hard, it doesn’t mean they’re not possible. Flickr has supported editing metadata (and even, for pro users, replacing the image data) along with a sophisticated (albeit arguably overcomplex) privacy model, while Facebook allows editing of comments (for a short time), and various Google services manage a mix of both.

It’s Twitter that, for whatever reasons (engineering expedience? a desire for simplicity?) not only ended up with both the inability to edit anything after the fact and an almost-not-there privacy model, but did so in such a way that a crop of services following along copied them. I’d single out Instagram, which made almost exactly the same design decisions. (You can’t change an Instagram photo’s caption or location once it’s post, or have different privacy settings per image, or (again) for location. Hell, they don’t even return whether a user is private in the API responses. At least Twitter, which otherwise has the same limitations, gets that one right.)

Obviously, there are some good reasons to implement systems the Twitter way rather than the Flickr one. I just wish - and I think that Kellan feels the same - that occasionally people would consider whether the richness that’s been lost might be worth spending some effort on.

dconstruct, by iamdanw

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:07:43 +0100

dconstruct, by iamdanw

"An officer of the Department of Corporations asked Systrom how Instagram made money. “That’s a..."

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 22:41:10 +0100

“

An officer of the Department of Corporations asked Systrom how Instagram made money.

“That’s a great question,” said Systrom. “We do not.”

Instagram had considered various means of making money but “nothing came of it,” Systrom explained.

”

- Business Insider: Instagram’s Financial Report: No Revenues, $2.7 Million In Losses, $5 Million In The Bank (via iamdanw)

Chris Heathcote’s picture of my incoming flight stacking...

Thu, 17 May 2012 18:46:13 +0100

Chris Heathcote’s picture of my incoming flight stacking over north-west London last Thursday.

joshuanguyen: dbreunig: Mike Krieger explains why Instagram...

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:01:00 +0100

joshuanguyen:

dbreunig:

Mike Krieger explains why Instagram uploads photos so quickly.

It’s slight of app.

Great deck on why speed is a feature. Esp. on mobile.

I’m a little surprised this is news to people; it took me a few months to figure out that Instagram had to be doing this, but I always think of myself as slow.

The billion dollar valuation for the company still looks high every time I see it, but the critics who suggest that sharing photographs from mobile phones is either obvious or was already solved haven’t thought at all about how well that app works. (It’s reminiscent of the dismissiveness of Twitter a few years ago, which amazingly I still hear around the office occasionally.)