Instagram “Feeds” Its Followers

Instagram has now made the feed accessible to the web. Check it out at http://www.instagram.com

You can see your normal Instragram feed along with comments much as in the mobile app.

Instagram on the big screen

The first thing that I notice is that the display on my laptop is much bigger than my phone. This is both good and bad. The flaws in the image are much more apparent, but you can more fully enjoy a truly epic shot. I think overall this is a net plus vs. the phone experience.

Keep Your Comments In-line

Similar to the mobile interface, the poster’s first comment and a few of the most recent comments are displayed below the image. This is a good alternative to forcing an expand to see comments or listing all comments in line. You get a flavor for the interaction, but can scroll on by without a challenge.

Like and Comment All You Want

The web interface makes adding a [heart] or comment to a photo about as easy as the mobile interface. You can click a nice-sized icon or double click the image to like it. A comment bar is always accessible below the current comments, so you can click there are start typing. Of course, for most of us, typing on the computer is much easier than entering comments from the phone, but adding emoji will be quite tricky.

Proper Profile Page

This one isn’t as obvious at first, since you will just be in a normal feed, but once you click on an Instagramers avatar, you will launch their profile page. This page is great. Much like the mobile version, it shows your avatar and your profile text, along with your number of photos, followers, and followings. Fortunately, the banner is more than just the text. Instragram creates a collage of your images that will slowly transition to different images in a grid pattern.

This is a much better way to highlight an artist or user and I hope to see this in an IG update of the future for the mobile version.

How Will a WebFeed Impact the Community?

It seems that this is another example of Facebook effect on Instagram. I like that I can access from the web and it gives me a place to send people other than Tumblr or Flickr for my Instagram photos. Of course, on the other side, the community becomes just a little bit less cozy and intimate. I honestly miss the early days of Instagram and all of the community that was fostered by the mutual activity in their carefully confined garden. But, that hasn’t been the reality for awhile and certainly not since Facebook acquired the service. So, we might as well enjoy the convenience of having easier access to our feed and easier presence for our followers and new fans.

Check it out and let me know what you think. Will it change Instagram? Is it better than the mobile experience?

Whether on the Vine?

Vine in the News

Twitter’s new service, called Vine and found at vine.co (that’s “dot company”), is already making headlines today. It seems that they allowed an explicit video to be promoted into their “Editor’s Choice” list which is automatically placed into every users feed. Fortunately, it was stopped before I experienced that shocker.

I hope they figure out quick how to eliminate that possibility cause that’s a deal-breaker for me and my family. Especially since there doesn’t seem to be a great reason to invest time on Vine other than amusement (not that fun is bad).

The Vine blog introduced the service last week as follows:

Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger. They’re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They’re quirky, and we think that’s part of what makes them so special.

I hope that some more “people, settings, ideas, and objects” emerge beyond the focus on quirky and humorous that is the current trend. Not that i don’t enjoy shoes walking themselves or cats disappearing, but I think the service deserves to be more than that and needs to be to hold my attention long-term.

Experience on the Vine

From an experience perspective, they did some things very well. I really like the way that new videos are created. Like Instagram for photos, Vine succeeds in making video-creation accessible to the masses. To create a video, you simply hit the camcorder icon and are presented with the viewfinder. The camera records while you are touching the viewfinder and pauses if you let go. This continues until you fill 6 seconds (or quit sooner). So, you can easily catch small chunks and form something in moments. Then you see a preview of your video looping as it will on the service. At that point you can post or discard it. The only complaint here is that if you choose not to post, it won’t be saved to your phone gallery either. I took a short clip of my daughter at lunch that she didn’t want me to post, amd it’s gone forever.

Also, I like that you can scroll through a feed and the videos just start playing. Scroll down and another one loads quickly and starts playing. Vine did 3 things that really make the browsing snappy:

1. Short, looping video = loads quickly and keeps playing
2. No play button = the videos play immediately, draws you in immediately
3. Endless page feed = scroll down and find another video

These design decisions work together to make the browsing pretty effortless and tends to make you scroll down for ‘just one more’ clip.

I think Vine will find an audience. I hope that there are some artistic, content, and community values that develop over time.

Find me on Vine as @DrewWilken or check my twitter feed. It’ll probably continue to have some Vine’s crawling about.

Inauguration Day!

This post is an inauguration. The Presidential Inauguration isn’t until tomorrow, and it’s a big deal. President Obama will officially start his second term as POTUSA. Today, I’m ceremoniously entering the blogosphere, the Technorati, and potentially the forum of verbose windbags. This inaugural address is a big deal for me. I’ll try to keep it meaningful, but I hope you will forgive occasional ramblings or musings that don’t move your thoughts to new heights. I always enjoy starting out. I remember my first friend on Facebook and posting my first picture to Instagram only moments after hearing about it. Creating my first interest page on Evemi was a rush for me. Inaugurations are fun!

It seems appropriate to acknowledge the why, what, and how of this thing that is to become my blog space. I’m starting now because I’ve been challenged by a friend, so that’s “why”. I appreciate that peer pressure can make us better humans. It just did that for me. So, how will writing into a blog make me better? I can’t be fully sure, but I hope to explore some ideas, expand my community of thought, and to push myself toward other firsts. I’ve listed some interests on my ABOUT page, and surely some of the “what” will relate to those topics.

I believe strongly that our minds are not fixed in capacity (recent science backs me up), and I aspire to continuously learn and grow, to “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” in the immortal words of Steve Jobs from his Stanford University commencement address of 2005. So, even though I know that I have limited time and resource to bring, I will let other pursuits languish and do my best to blog-about as I find myself with something to say or to at least question and explore.

Which brings me to my last point. I want to pioneer. It’s a part of me. I have had the pleasure of pioneering and innovating many things in my work in the the new mobile economy and I plan to continue. There are always opportunities before us to explore, analyze, study, find the gaps, connect the dots, or just do. I hope that this blog becomes a way for me to share some of my efforts toward redefining mobility and customer experience. I also hope that I will find others that will join me and explore alongside. That’s the “how”.

Let’s get started, shall we?