Anyone that knows me, knows that my personal engagement with Facebook has wained over the last few years as the social media giant has grown into a giant ad revenue giant. The video below from Veritasium has drawn almost a million views in the last two days. Why? because it punches a gaping hole in Facebook’s pay for “Likes” system and the way Facebook’s pay to play promotions work. If you are a marketer, advertiser, or anyone that uses Facebook as a platform to engage with your target audience, you should watch this. What Veritasium points out is hard to deny, and the point they make about audience engagement effects you more than you know.
Social Networking
Tadaa, I’m Leaving Instagram.
Yesterday Instagram made it official that they were going to be running ads in your feed starting later this month. In the announcement that they posted, they said they would make it seamless, and that it wouldn’t be disruptive to the user experience that Instagram fans have come to love. I hate to say it but this was inevitable.
Instagram is a profit center in a company that is going to make money. Like it or not, Instagram is part of Facebook, and Facebook is a for profit business. That doesn’t mean that you have to stick with Instagram though. There are other photo sharing solutions, some every bit s good if not better.
I have decided to slowly leave Instagram. Well not slowly leave, just quit posting to it as often. It’s sort of like my Facebook usage. The only thing that ever really gets posted there by me are posts from this blog via Twitter. As for Instagram I am moving to Tadaa. It’s free, it offers the same level of social networking, it has all the same kind of filters in it, It has an extended range of features that Instagram doesn’t have, and the user interface is solid. I’m sure Tadaa has its own issues. I know there is a chance they might be bought or start inserting ads in the photo feed. For now though, they aren’t part of Facebook, and they offer the same experience as Instagram and more.
In case you are wondering what it has that Instagram doesn’t here is a list starting with the most important thing of all.
- You Keep The Copyrights To Your Photos
- 26 HD Filters (Retro, Black & White, Sepia & many more)
- HD Tilt-Shift (selective blur with real Bokeh)
- HD Clarity
- Selective Frames and Borders
- Brightness, Contrast & Saturation
- Rapid Capture (take series of photos with no delay)
- Light Table (Review, manage and edit your tadaa photos in your own photo lab)
- Apply multiple Filters
- Full EXIF Support: Saves & Reads Date/Time, Aperture/Exposure and Geolocation InformationSave locally without having to post
- High-res photo Blog on tadaa.net
- Quiet Hours for push notifications
- Clear your image cache
Ray-Ban Social Visionaries, from Animade and Stink Digital.
There is no denying the power of Facebook on the social media front. Like Facebook or not, they are the 800 pound gorilla which is why so many brands have turned to them to promote their products. Now when a company promotes something on Facebook, they can do it the wrong way or they can do it the right way. In most cases, companies advertising on Facebook do it the wrong way with an in your face sponsored ad that runs in your feed, on your wall, ignored by your trained eyes. Then there are companies that get it right, and know that if they want to promote their brand in the social media sphere they need to be a bit more subtle, a bit more fun.
Animade was asked by Stink Digital to design and produce the Ray Ban Social Visionaries Facebook app. The app connects with your information to produce a bespoke animation that bestows a ‘Visionary’ title upon you based on your usage. The animations are are built from 50 predefined sequences that are selected randomly by the app and assembled. This is a pretty impressive piece of coding as well as the animations that were created. The video below shows the overview. The videos below that are examples of what the app produced.
The Sad Sad World of Middle Class Problems on Twitter.
God we live in a screwed up world, and no I’m not talking about mass shootings, genocide, civil war, disease, education, starvation, racism, or any other host of real problems. I’m talking about Twitter’s “Middle Class Problems“. While this is pretty funny to read, it’s also really sad that people actually, seriously tweet about this shit.
Here we have people complaining about real issues like ioS 7 colors being to bright, or how soy milk in tea is really gross, or eating to much sushi, or to many parties in St. Tropez.
Middle Class Problem on Twitter is a catalog of trivial complaints that let all of us share in the misery while showing just how shallow and unnecessary most of our first world complaints really are. While most of the complaints are really pretty funny to read, because they are so vacuous, it is at the same time really pretty intriguing. Here’s a thought, maybe they could juxtapose some of these against tweets like, “Just drank polluted water, looks like dysentery for me”, or “Mosquitos just killed my baby with West Nile Virus”. Kind of puts things in perspective no?
Modular 4 