Tech: Twitter vs Facebook: Instagram cuts Twitter connection, becomes more a creature of Facebook

Big feud between Twitter and Facebook, the latest wrinkle in which is Instagram's stoppage of use of a Twitter facility for tweeting fotos. The stoppage delivers Instagram "more firmly" into "Facebook's realm of control."  It all swept right past me, as I've never used Instagram and hardly know what it is or does.  But I noticed the item because it makes clear the competitive struggle between Twitter and Facebook.  I'd guess that Facebook put the screws to Instagram which then had to choose between the two mega-monster online institutions.

-- Technowlb, refWrite Backpage technics newspotter, analyst, columnist




Financial Times (Dec6,2k12)

December 6, 2012 12:21 am

Instagram abandons Twitter feature

By April Dembosky in San Francisco

Instagram has stopped using a Twitter feature that allows its photos to appear in the Twitter feed, a move that puts Instagram’s visual content more firmly in Facebook’s realm of control.

Clamping down on the channel with Twitter compromises the philosophy that guided Instagram, before it was acquired by Facebook, to partner openly with other social networks.

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The shift underscores a growing tension between Facebook and Twitter, as the two dominant social networks compete for both advertising dollars and users’ time. Photos are an increasingly valuable asset for both, as they are proven to increase engagement on social networks. Those metrics are then presented to potential advertisers as a display of audience reach.

Before the acquisition, Instagram used Twitter Cards, a technical feature of the microblogging site that renders photographs so they appear properly in the Twitter stream.

Earlier this week, Twitter began receiving reports from users that their Instagram images were off-centre or strangely cropped, cutting out faces from the frame, for example. Android phone users saw no image at all.

“This is due to Instagram disabling its Twitter cards integration,” the company said in a blog posted Wednesday.

Kevin Systrom, Instagram chief executive, speaking at the LeWeb conference in Paris on Wednesday, said the change was a technical one, not a competitive one: “this isn’t actually a consequence of us getting acquired”.

Instagram began as a mobile-only app. It has since built its own website. Mr Systrom said he wants to direct users there “because we think it’s a better user experience currently”, he said, rather than do it through Twitter’s technology.

Instagram users will still be able to use Twitter to send out photos, but their followers will only see a text link. To view the photo, they will be directed back to Instagram.com.

Photos posted on Facebook, Tumblr, and Foursquare will not be affected.

“Images in advertisers’ minds are better than text any day,” said James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. “The ability to suggest that the visitors to the site are more likely to be emotionally engaged by the images, means they are open to the emotional message of the advertisers.”

If Facebook can show that Instagram’s photos are able to be viewed on Facebook and not on Twitter, it could be a compelling selling point.

While Twitter is developing its own photo filters similar to Instagram’s, it is several years behind. Facebook has been increasing its efforts to be seen as the epicentre of people’s photo sharing activities, from acquiring Instagram earlier this year, to the launch last Friday of Photo Sync, which encourages users to store all photos taken with their mobile phones inside Facebook.

Technics: Internet: How Pinterest got mimicked by Pinspire (aka Pin Spire)

TECH

 

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1/22/2012 @ 2:49PM |4,584 views

"Parasite" Phenomenon - 

Radical Copycatting of 

Pinterest

+ Comment now

Many successful websites and apps spawn a cluster of imitators.
After Instagram caught fire, mobile apps with various effects
and filtering techniques flooded the Apple and Android markets.
Some of them are quite innovative and cool – particularly
PhotoForge 2 and Wordfoto. None came close to matching
the Instagram growth juggernaut.

But perhaps the most brazen – and amusing – case of radical
copycatting I have ever seen is the way Pinterest has been
mirrored by an aggressive “parasite” over the past two months.
Pinterest is perhaps the biggest web phenomenon of this winter.
The site hit 11 Million unique users during one December week
alone. Alexa now pegs it as the 32nd most popular website in
the United States. Visitors spend more than 11 minutes on the
site daily, crushing Twitter on this metric by more than 50%.

----------------------------

Forbes (January22,2k12)

Tero Kuittinen, is a Forbes Contributor

He covers mobile hardware, software and gaming. 
Twitter: @teroterotero

+ Follow on Forbes

— Reposted here by Techknowlb

Follow @Owlb

 general editor, refWrite backpage

----------------------------------

Pinterest is pure catnip for mature women. Wedding tips, babies 

in funny poses, mason jar decoration ideas, cake recipes and 

exercise slogans drive the site. The runaway success of 

Pinterest probably demonstrates how much most mainstream 

websites cater to male visitors. 
There had been some kind of 

unmet demand for a site 
combining hair-braiding advice 
with hedgehog babies in rubber 
boots. Pinterest filled this 
vacuum 

highly effectively.

And as the highest 

form of flattery, 

Pinterest is now 

shadowed by one 

of the purest parasites ever. Something called 

Pinspire copies the look, feel and functionality of Pinterest almost perfectly.

There is even what seems to be a very carefully calibrated
guerrilla marketing campaign – many of the new Pinterest
posts are now followed by a polite, complimentary note:
“Absolutely adorable! Can I pin this on my board at
pin spire .com?” These notes flatter the original pinner,
while directing traffic to Pinspire. They appear to be crafted
to land just on the right side of the line defining raw spam.
The spelling of these notes recently changed from “pinspire”
to “pin spire”, indicating possible evasion from
countermeasures.

And they are driving healthy growth of Pinspire. Alexa now 
ranks Pinspire as roughly the number 13’000 site in America, 
up from being number 100’000 in early January. This matches 
the ranking of established, high-quality niche sites like Silicon 
Investor, Gamerankings or Calculated Risk – sites that took 
years to build and required vast amounts of content to claw their 
way to the middle.

Pinspire rocketed to this level in less than three months – and 
requiring little or no original design or content work. Judging 
from the latest wave of Pinspire redirect notes on Pinterest 
right now, the parasite just might stage another growth burst 
in coming months. The youth of Pinterest is probably what 
enables the parasitic competition – many consumers are only 
now discovering Pinterest and thus do not have much brand 
loyalty. It will be interesting to see where this saga is heading 
next.

Arts: Literary Arts Calendar: Bloom's Day is on its way, June 16, says James Joyce

NewYorkTimes (June5,2k11)

I've celebrated many Bloomsdays here in Toronto.  I recall some still today, recall the joyous del+t of the English language in the hands of a master, if whacky, wordsmith summa cum laude.  And we drank a lot, in the Irish pubs around town that were putting on the dog that year.

-- Owlb

May 25, 2011, 12:53 PM

Joyce Meets Twitter: Boiling Down ‘Ulysses’

By JULIE BLOOM

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” Seventeen characters left to complete a tweet. It just might work. What would James Joyce think of Twitter? More important, what would his handle be? It’s impossible not to imagine the inherent fun the great English-language experimentalist would find in translating his voluminous ideas onto the 140-character template, or at least the irresistible challenge.

On June 16, Bloomsday for those not in the know, lovers of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom (no relation) and Molly will have the opportunity to dip into the mind of Joyce and try to tweet his thoughts. Ulysses Meets Twitter 2011, a project created by one “Stephen from Baltimore,” invites devotees of the approximately 265,000-word work to recast the novel through tweets from start to finish within the 24-hour period that the novel’s odyssey through Dublin (on June 16, 1904) takes place.

“Would it be horrific? Beatific? Hence this experiment,” Stephen asks. We’ll find out, but for now the call is out for a global-volunteer army to tweet “Ulysses” on the @11ysses account. All volunteers need to do is choose a section, or several, from the 18 episodes, structured loosely on Homer’s epic, “then thoughtfully, soulfully, fancifully compose a series of 4-6 tweets to represent that section.” You have until May 30. More information is available at 11ysses.wordpress.com. Circe is taken.

Satire: Onion peel: Republican Gingrich maybe wannabe Prez

 Onion Twits

(Mar7,2k11)

Tech: Google: Aims to add every d*** service to its apps

Oh yeah. "Google is going to make sure [that] users of its Apps productivity and collaboration software can tap all of the company's services, according to Dave Girouard, president of the company's enterprise group, in a colorful tweet on Twitter," says the subhead of a press release that was reported by Chris Kanaracus and Juan Carlos Perez a year ago (April 09,2009) on a website for professionals  CIO [for Chief Information Officer].  Since I use Google's Blogger a lot, I not only make a furtive effort to monitor the motherload from time to time, but also I want to celebrate the improvements Blogger has made since Google took it over, adding it to its ever-growing portfolio of web services.  On this blog, I also use Google Reader  as "Owlbird's eclectic reader" to make available a selection of posts by interesting others, curiosity-peaking/-piquing posts to other blogs; this retitled feature is located the sidebare on refWrite page 3.

On the "social networking" medium, Twitter, of all places!  Coud it be that Google now owns Twitter too?

Technotes, by Owlie Scowlie
today featuring our publisher as a guest blogger for this column

When I last culled thru my Google Reader RSS grabs from these other blogs on my RSS feeds to Google Reader, I found myself making making comments on those blog posts, as the Reader allows.  I hoped they woud appear on my grabs on rW page 3.  But that didn't wash out technically, or shoud I say?, the attempt was a washout.  I was hoping too that my posts on those other blogs coud be cross-referenced to my coComments facility (not a Google facility). My use of coComment was intended to collect all my comments on the blogs of others, collect them from their diaspora in one place moderated by me. (If you go to coComment's homepage, enter "Semaphore" in the upper r+ search slot to get to my stuff.  Semaphore is the refWrite secretary for coComments, so she's a kind of secretary of foreign affairs. And, thus, like the rest of the refWrite staff, she's fictional -- cofictional and cofactual.)

But that coComment wish too, like posting to Google Reader RSS blog-entries for my refWrite readers,  seems unfeasible technically, for one reason or another (like the fact that the other blogs have their own moderation of comments).  Sad fact is that my coComments usage has been moribund for sometime, yet I have carried it on refWrite page 2's sidebar in all its glaring moribunditty -- perhaps I was settling for the simple idea a hope that the techical breakthru coud eventually be realized in regard to my more scattered written comments in the broader blogosphere, yet tie them all back for those refWrite readers who wanted to avail themselves of such an opportunity.

Back to Google stuff: Additionally I have a Gmail account where I get daily posts from trade lists like TidBits, Web Standards Group (tho I don't shine in meeting accessibility goals, partly because I barely have a website presence on the Internet), and CSS Digest (Cascading Style Sheets, is it?  I want to learn how to create a website, and do so).  I use iGoogle as a news hub, as well as a Google Search site -- altho I have many news sources, or as I like to call them "newshorses" or you coud call them "newswhoreses" (many of them are secularistically unprincipled, so Christian news outlets have no monopoly on being unprincipial).

And there's more reliance on Google laying behind what refWrite publishes.  I don't consider BlogSpot, which is another Google facility related to Blogger, to be the publisher of refWrite. but I coud go with copulisher.  That, refWrite folks, is me.  I'm accompanied by a fictional staff.  Not wanting to be stingy with terms, I coud go with the idea that BlogSpot is my copulisher.  It too has seen fabulous improvements since Google became its owner.  One ngging technical problem I'm facing is the complex task of adding a "Read More..." structure to my template, so that a lengthy blog appears in full on the indivudual blog-entry page, but only an intro or start of an entry appears on the mainpage, one for each of the 4 refWrite pages, and refWrite refBloggers Insert (a kind of page 5) devoted to problems of censorship of blogs in the various countries and persecution of bloggers around the globe.  This latter page is decvoted to freedom of the press, the "blogging press."

So, thank you, Google and Blogger and BlogSpot, from all of us at refWrite.

Yours for the meanwhyled,

-- Albert Gedraitis, publisher