Category: Social Media

I first discovered photography in high school, but got more serious about in college. Flickr was a huge part of that experience; I could upload a photo and have comments on it almost immediately. I interacted with people who had similar interests in groups, and learned a ton by asking questions of other users.

The community that I once enjoyed on Flickr is no longer there – Twitter has replaced most of it — and at one point I closed my account. While I later re-joined the service, it’s just not the same, sadly. My 2013 Project 365 wasn’t nearly as fun as my previous two projects just because fewer people saw them.

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Instagram:

Today, we’re excited to bring you Instagram Direct, a new way to send photo and video messages to friends.

Basically, after taking a photo, you select if it should be posted on your timeline or sent “direct” to specific people.

You know when you see a DM fail on Twitter? I can’t wait to see someone’s romantic selfies accidentally posted for the world to see.

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The world is weird.

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Matthew Panzarino has details on the company’s financial information:

Twitter’s revenues have been revealed for the first time as well. Revenues for 2012 were $316.9 million, for a loss of $79.4M and in the first half of 2013 they’ve already earned $253.6M for a loss of $69.3M. That’s just above estimates from last year but well below tracking of over $600M for the year.

In its filing paperwork, Twitter reports that it has 218.3 million active monthly users, who have logged a total of over 300 billion tweets. Most interestingly, 75 percent of Twitter usage is from mobile devices.

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The company announced the move in a tweet, naturally:

We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.

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John Carey at Fifty Foot Shadows, on Instagram and Flickr:

Instagram is built for casual, mass consumption and sharing mostly lifestyle photos. The reactions to these shots of day to day life and “look what I’m doing now” moments are decidedly more quick, friendly, ah ha! sorts of moments. Those using it to share more serious work simply have to come to terms that its a mixed bag of educated reactions within the service (same goes for using Tumblr as a means to share photographic work).

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Ok, fine. I know FeedBurner isn’t dead. But I can’t imagine it will last forever, and as a general rule I don’t like having business-critical things running on Google’s services.

When I moved away from Feedburner, I ended up replacing it with FeedPress, a paid service that gives publishers lots of tools to deal with their RSS feed, including statistics, custom host names, newsletters, and social media posting.

The last was especially important to me.

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Mr. Blanc:

At the end of the day, Flickr is the only place I’ve got to put my best photographic work. And as much as I love the service, it’s just not cutting it — it doesn’t feel like the right place for my best photographic work. And I suspect I’m not alone.

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Adrianne Jeffries at The Verge:

Path, the photo-centric social network that just hit 10 million users yesterday, has been getting some heat for what some users say are spammy tactics to recruit new users. Digital marketer Stephen Kenwright downloaded the app earlier this week, tried it out, uninstalled it, and went to bed. When he woke up, he found that Path had gone on a rogue mission early in the morning, texting and robocalling an unknown number of his contacts, including his grandparents.

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The guys over at App.net were cool enough to give me a pile of App.net invites. If you haven’t played with the service yet, go check it out.

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As rumored, Facebook launched “Facebook Home” today, an Android launcher that promises deep Facebook integration, right on the lock and home screens of Android phones.

(The HTC First was also announced, a Jelly Bean-powered phone on AT&T with Facebook Home built-in. However, the launcher is coming to other device soon.)

Facebook was smart about this. Instead of a skin or a new version of Android, this shouldn’t get Google too riled up. In fact, Facebook Home will be for free, on the Google Play store.

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Adrianne Jeffries at The Verge has a great interview up with Markus Spiering, the service’s lead at Yahoo. In it, he says:

The end goal for the platform is to provide users with the possibility that, as long as they have their photos on Flickr, their photos are everywhere.

That’s a bold goal, but one I can get behind. I hope they can pull it off.

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