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Author Archives: Chris Miller
Instagram tagged photo feature is the next Facebook step
As Instagram prepares to map your Instagram username on their service to your Facebook account name, tagging people in photos is a logical step. Identifying individual in photos is very powerful helping map and strengthen the social graph Facebook continues to build.
Imagine you post a photo in Facebook now, all the prompts ask you to please tag the other person. Including the recognition they use to actually put a square of peoples faces. It encourages you to do that tagging step of the other person. It encourages you to expose more of your personal life connections via photos that share life moments.
Having a photo of yourself that also includes others allows Instagram (Facebook) to further use their algorithms to build trusted contacts and close friends. How often are you getting prompted to add someone now on Facebook and you wonder how they figured out you know them? Mutual connections are a strong indicator but being in a picture almost guarantees you know them.
A lot of people seemed to doubt me when I first posted how Instagram and Facebook were moving closer together. Here we are at a common feature with common security measures (you can remove yourself from a tag or set it to manual for approval only) between the two networks as Mashable noted.
You may have built a separate identity on Instagram with alternate connections. Soon this will come together and your Instagram pics will be placed in your Facebook profile and those tagged will be suggested as friends.
I am just calling it now. What are your thoughts?
Related posts:
The top 5 Instagram web clients
Instagram and Facebook just got one step closer
Posterous sends final notice and backup plan
Posterous, acquired by Twitter, announced back in Feb 2013 that it would shut down April 30, 2013. They have now issued an email reminder and steps to archive your content.
On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.
Right now, you can download all of your Posterous Spaces including your photos, videos, and documents.
Here are the steps:
- Go to http://posterous.com/#backup.
- Click to request a backup of your Space by clicking “Request Backup” next to your Space name.
- Return to http://posterous.com/#backup to download a .zip file.
You are also able to import or move into WordPress, Squarespace and some other platforms. While all of these provide a way out, it strengthens the argument of what happens to a product or site when Twitter buys it. In two moves Twitter kills the ecosystem of smaller partners and companies. One could also counter that Google does the same. I would agree and say they both follow the same optimistic path of buying good talent and closing products down.
A founder of Posterous started Posthaven, a paid service, to continue on what Posterous offered. Outside of buying an application with a one time fee, so many of us are hesitant to pay monthly for anything. It is not in our new social DNA. Companies are fighting to make free products, reduce advertismenets to appease users and stay afloat.
What ar your thoughts? Did you use Posterous? Are you surprised that Twitter shut them down as well? Are you migrating or giving it up?
Google Keep – you keep that to yourself thanks
The mistake by Google accidentally showing Google Keep and now launching it has me thinking. I use Google products daily. I enjoy Google products. I have also learned that Google pulls the plug on them when they feel like it. So for this reason alone I may stay away from Google Keep.
Arstechnica wrote a piece a few weeks ago about Google Keep being in the works as an alternative to Evernote.
Google is prepping to launch a cloud-based notetaking service to compete with Evernote and Simplenote. Google Keep will present an interface that lets users create notes with checklist items, text, or images inside.
So imagine that I spend weeks, months or even a year or more saving items to Google Keep and using the cloud storage. Suddenly, Google says this really isn’t working out to anything we want to do. You have three weeks and we pull the plug.
We have seen this pull the plug attitude with iGoogle, Punched, Google Reader, Dodgeball and even more (supposedly Feedburner will die soon). I cannot blame Google for not continuing with applications and services that show no monetary value or growth. But the idea that it gets promoted so heavily for short terms and then all the data removed with a total shutdown scares me.
Imagine if Google suddenly decides free analytics accounts are useless? Years of statistical data gone. What about they way they recently handled small business accounts for Google Apps? There is no reason they could not suddenly say pay us or we turn everything off. Somewhere the free model should scare you.
Note: The moment I was ready to post what I wrote yesterday while flying Om Malik posted an almost identical title and article.
Google Affiliate Network (GAN) closing – are publishers mad?
Google Affiliate Network, abbreviated GAN, announced it is closing on July 31, 2013. Payments will process through October 31, 2013 before total shutdown. We should note this is the second time GAN has closed down.
Many articles on the web are expressing dissatisfaction in investing the time in Google Affiliate Network and building up their affiliate status. But I have not seen one article yet from the publisher viewpoint.
As a publisher, even small, you had access to thousands of affiliates via Google that now vanish. I am curious in the amount of money that was gained, and paid to Google, being a publisher. While there were a few larger publishers in GAN, many were smaller businesses leveraging bloggers and sites to market goods across sites and audiences they could never reach.
Publishers are now being sent to the Adsense network, which is still Google owned. So they are not giving up on making money from driving advertising. But now publishers lose control on who gets approved, if set up that way, on who runs the ads. Adsense does not follow this.
This means that now your advertising, as a publisher, is les controlled. Also your ads, as an affiliate, are using Google’s secret algorithm to run ads instead of you choosing specific publishers to apply to.
What are your thoughts on this? Are you a publisher or an affiliate? Does this change how you run or publish using Google ad services?