Category: Web Apps

Instagram: Is it for you?

Instagram is a photography app for iPhone. Mashable recently wrote Is Instagram the Next Distribution Opportunity for News Media?, which included an interview with Andy Carvin, a senior strategist at National Public Radio (NPR).

Carvin talked about how NPR is using Instagram to connect with photographers. There’s an NPR Tumblr blog where photos from people around the world are displayed, some of them coming in via Instagram.

After the Mashable article appeared, @rafatali claimed on Twitter that creating a distribution scheme based on Instragram was lame. Carvin countered that NPR was looking to connect with great photos and photographers, and kicking the tires of Instagram was a way to get there.

@rafatali: What’s so lame about it? We’re just kicking the tires and seeing if we can gin up anything interesting there. cc @mathewiMon Jan 03 19:07:31 via TweetDeckAndy Carvin
acarvin

Mashable likes Instagram. When they first reviewed it, Jennifer Van Grove called it a genius idea. She said it turned photos into social works of art.

I like Instagram, too. I was so struck by it that I included it in this post: New Tech Toys for your Blog or Browser and iPhone. I’m not convinced that an iPhone app is ready to create a new media distribution channel, but I’m open to conversion, particularly if the app gets ported to Android and BlackBerry soon.

What is Instagram?

Instagram is a free iPhone app that uses filters to make your photos more artistic. Use it to take a photo, run it through any of the eleven current filters, and send it to any or all of Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr with one click. In The words “free” and “amazing” are together way too rarely for my tastes, Metalia praised Instagram’s “easy-ass interface and gorgeous filters.”

Here’s a fern that sits behind my desk. I used the Toaster filter on the photo. Seconds after I took it, you could see it on Twitter, Flickr and Instagram on the web. Anyone who saw it on Instagram’s web page could tweet it or share it on Facebook.

But Instagram is a phone app, so the real action takes place there, not on a web page. In the app, you can see popular photos, as in this screen shot.

While in the app, you can view all your photos, find friends and look at their photos, or follow people. Users can comment on photos within Instagram. It sounds a little like Flickr, doesn’t it? But this is all done through your phone, where Flickr often exhibits high quality camera-based photos.

Should you be using it?

For bloggers with Posterous or Tumblr blogs, Instagram is be a no-brainer method of getting photos posted. Right now that only applies to iPhone users. Blurbed is using it on a Tumblr blog. It isn’t restricted to Posterous and Tumblr. Notes from the Trenches is using it on her blog. And My Little Life is using it on a Blogger blog.

There are two missing bits in this app, which I think will be coming eventually with the app’s increasing popularity. The first missing piece is making the app available on Adroid and BlackBerry.

The other missing piece is to let users of WordPress, Blogger, and other blogging tools post the images directly to those blogs, too. It’s a two step process for those blog platforms now. For example, the screen shot of popular Instagram photos is one I took and sent to Flickr with Instagram so I could use it here. Once it was on Flickr, I grabbed the HTML to post it here. Two steps aren’t horribly taxing, but one easy step will mean wider adoption for the app.

For those of you who’ve already tried it, tell us what you think of the app. For those who have not, do you plan to try it?

Cross-posted on BlogHer.

Useful Links: Mobile Best Practices, Generations, Delicious insanity

Mobile Web Application Best Practices was released by the W3C as a recommendation this week. Early in the document, there is a list of best practices, which number 32. One I’m really hoping to see put into practice is Enable Automatic Sign-in. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to use some app on my phone and found I wasn’t able to while away from home because I needed to sign in and didn’t have the information with me, rendering an app I’d used before useless.

The Pew study for 2010 on Generations Online is out. Interesting summary of findings on the linked paged, and a nice chart that is easy to interpret.

First they say they will, and then they won’t. Dump Delicious, that is. Yahoo! is sunsetting some of its sites, most notably Delicious. Get the story plus options and alternatives to Delicious in my article at BlogHer. The following is dedicated to Yahoo! with love.

Breakthrough thinking

Writing that recent post on trends in tech got me thinking about where trends and new ideas come from. If you wanted to be the creator of the next big thing, what kind of thinking would help you figure out what the next big thing might be?

Plain old creative thinking is important, of course. The technical know-how to implement your creativity is needed. But what else?

One way to answer that question is to look at how things we use now may have begun.

Wouldn’t it be great if . . . ?

I think many great ideas we see as trends now probably started with someone saying this. Twitter, Flickr and many other successes probably started with this question.

That’s really great, but . . .

Dissatisfaction with something you use but would like to see improve is probably a big motivator in creating new ideas that take off. That’s where HTML5 came from – messy and chaotic as its growth has been. That’s where the ideas that knock a former leader out of first place come from. When everyone agreed that Internet Explorer sucked, people went out to create browsers that didn’t suck and we got Firefox and other browsers.

Half a billion people are currently using Facebook. We use it but we don’t trust it. There have been privacy issues with Facebook from the first, and they persist. If someone came along with a social network that did what Facebook does, minus the privacy concerns, it could be the next big thing.

I want to . . .

I want to be able to check my email from any computer. I want to be able to pay my bills online. I want to be able to back up my data on a disk that is outside my house and not on my computer. I want people to be able to read my posts and leave a comment with their opinions about the topic. I want to see a TV show on my computer or my smart phone.

Thoughts like that have lead to huge changes in what we do with out online lives. What’s the next thing that people are going to want to do online?

What else?

What kinds of thinking and questions lead to breakthrough ideas? Can you suggest some?

Useful Links: CSS3 Gradients, Accessibility, Tantik talks, free images, HTML5 elements

Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator is one of the ColorZilla tools. It’s online as an app. It creates a pure CSS gradient using a Photoshop-like interface and provides cross browser code. The other ColorZilla tools are downloadable and include a color picker, an eyedropper, Firebug and more.

Disabilities Act may be expanded to Net and Beyond at SFGate only talks about the cost of extending accessibility to places like the Net and movie theaters and not the good such a move would accomplish. The fact is that every change made in the name of accessibility benefits everyone, not just the community of disabled Americans. Accessible is better for everyone, more options are better for everyone, clarity is better for everyone.

HTML5 Right here, Right now is an hour long talk by Tantek Çelik at a Yahoo! conference.

Find free images online! is a good resource list of many sites that provide free images. Seems like students always need images to create web sites for class projects, here’s a great list of places to send them to look.

Periodic table of HTML5 elements is handy. Lists every element in the spec, defines it, and lets you search for an example use in the wild. Nice. Note: This is a new version of the Periodic Table of HTML5, posted in 2014 by Robert Mening.

Useful Links: eLearning in Haiti, Twitsper, Dijit

University of the People is moving into Haiti and it’s a big hit. Story from ReadWriteWeb.

Twitsper is an android app that allows you to tweet only to a Twitter list.  I expect it to be popular–it’s definitely useful–and make its way to other app stores as well. Or maybe into Twitter itself as the developers are hoping.

Dijit is a library of widgets that can be used with HTML5 elements to make them more accessible in assistive technology devices.

Useful Links: 20 things, HTML5, lessons learned, 7 sins

20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web is an interactive web app built in HTML5. It looks like a children’s book. And it’s slick. Great for a class reading assignment.

Using HTML5’s New Semantic Tags Today. Terrific article by Emily Lewis at Script Junkie.

Blogging to Support Policy Goals: MomsRising Shares Lessons Learned. How one organization ran a social media campaign with a specific goal in mind. What worked and what could be done better.

Using the 7 Deadly Sins in Higher Ed Web Marketing at .eduGuru is a take-off on an article at Smashing Magazine, but this one is aimed at high ed.

Bright idea from bit.ly: link bundles

The URL shortening service bit.ly announced Bit.ly Bundles on their blog yesterday. Now, instead of sending one link with a shortened URL, you can send a whole bundle of links.

When you click the bundled link, it opens up in a special Bit.ly Bundles page where you get a rich media preview of every link in the bundle. Here’s an example suggested by bit.ly using this URL: http://bit.ly/9kfiz3. It links to Jauntsetter’s Best of Washington D.C.

This is a way to aggregate, curate, and organize a variety of information on a topic. A bundle of links to your best Thanksgiving recipes, multiple links to the latest announcement from Apple, multiple links to the hottest news in shoelaces – whatever – you get the idea. You click the link, you go the the Bundle page, you choose what you want to read in full.

The Bundle page has a comment box for reactions from people who use the page. And stats showing how many times the page has been viewed.

Nice. Cool, even.

Cool, provided you’re one of the people who don’t mind clicking on shortened URLs. Since a shortened URL doesn’t tell you much about where the link will take you, many people are wary of them. Now the shortened URL can blindside you with even more mystery links. What’s your opinion on that?

How to use it

Want to make a bundle of links?

To make a bit.ly bundle, go to bit.ly and register. It’s free, it’s easy. As a registered user, you can create bundles of links.

Enter your links in a form, then click Bundle. A new page opens where you add titles and other material to your bundle. On this page, you can add or remove links, rearrange links, add titles and descriptions. Then view it or share it. I made a bundle called Places to watch web series programs. Click the link to see the Bundle page. The link I just used is the shortened bit.ly link, which is quick to copy as an option on the bit.ly page. The Share button lets me tweet the link or share to Facebook.

All you need is to register and have an idea for some links you’d like to share in a bundle. Very easy.

The bit.ly bundle page reminds me of what you see when you use paper.li to create a paper from a Twitter list. It’s meant to look good and be engaging. Bit.ly wants you to regard the page as a resource where you’ll stay a while, and perhaps even leave a comment.

What do you think? Are you going to give it a try?

Cross-posted in slightly different form at BlogHer.