Sunday, June 23, 2013

Video Killed The Instagram Star




TechCrunch





Video Killed The Instagram Star



instavid

Instagram, an app best known for photo-sharing, added video last week, as it (and parent Facebook) sought to defend against the advance of Twitter’s fast-growing video-sharing app, Vine. The hope was to give its users a whole new way to share what is happening around them with friends. But while it was an ambitious new feature for the company to add, the end result has been that Instagram has sacrificed the user experience for those consuming content.


Becoming “Instagram for Video”


More than a year ago, Hunter Walk broke down the comparison between photos and videos and exactly why it was so difficult for someone to become the “Instagram for video“:


“Think about the photos you look at in either your social feeds or specific photos sites: 99% of them interest you because the subject(s) and/or camera holder is someone you know (or you yourself). Because pictures are static, you can also grok and scan them very quickly, meaning the “cost” of a bad picture is low, hence you are interested in pictures from a wider variety of friends.”


That’s not necessarily true for video, where there’s “a much higher cost to watching a video,” he argued. Viewers are much less willing to invest the time needed in a video to find the part that’s interesting. Especially not if they came to it not expecting video.


And here is the trouble that Instagram finds itself in: It didn’t fundamentally make video creation more artistic, nor did it make video consumption any more enjoyable. In fact, the few “features” it added to differentiate itself from Vine — the availability of 15 seconds versus 6, and video filters — have both been done before.


A singularity of purpose


It’s not just that Instagram failed to make video easier to create or more enjoyable to watch. It’s that, in shoehorning video into an app that users had previously used exclusively for photos, it ruined the core user experience for everyone.


Think about all of the best, most popular apps out there today. Almost every single one of them does one thing, and it does it well. There’s Twitter for broadcasting short messages of text with the world. There’s Snapchat for sending ephemeral messages to your friends. And there’s Vine for shooting and sharing short videos.


Instagram used to be one of those types of apps. It used to be the app for sharing and viewing beautiful photos from friends. But now, with the addition of video, that singularity of purpose is gone. Users who had spent the last few years creating highly curated lists of their favorite mobile photographers have spent the last few days wading through a sea of crappy video selfies. By introducing one little feature to its toolset, Instagram is pushing those hardcore users out the door.



Can Instagram be saved?


As can be the case whenever a company with a large user base announces a major change to its app or website (see Digg, Facebook), the reaction to Instagram’s addition of video has been somewhat negative among pundits, reviewers, and users. The app had lost half a star in its ratings just a day after the video feature had been released. More telling is that, most negative reviews are due to videos clogging up users’ feeds, not posting, or slowing down their ability to view photos.


John Gruber perhaps put it best:


“They did this to spite Vine (and Twitter, which owns Vine), not because it makes Instagram better, because it doesn’t make Instagram better, it makes it worse.”


There are some who believe the problem will be self-correcting. Everyone is rushing to shoot videos on Instagram now, but over time people will stop experimenting and uploading crappy videos to the service. On the other hand, we’ll likely see more thoughtful, more artistic videos begin to emerge on the platform. When that happens, those people argue, users will begin to find a lot more value in having videos in their Instagram feed.



Others suggest that Instagram allow user to filter out videos or simply separate its feeds into photos and videos. That would have the effect of letting those who show up just for the videos to still have access to them, while restoring the photo-only Instagram feed for everyone else.


That might improve things, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Instagram we have now is not the Instagram we call came to love over the last few years. It’s unlikely that its 130 million users will leave en masse and find another photo-sharing app to idolize in its place.


But maybe they find themselves opening Instagram just a little bit less. And then sharing just a little bit less. And so on and so on.















BuzzFeed Says New ‘Flight Mode' Campaign Shows ‘The Consumerization Of B2B Marketing'



buzzfeed flight mode

BuzzFeed always seems to be the first online publication that comes up when people want to talk about smart, creatives approaches to “native” advertising, so here’s a cool example of what the site is doing with advertisers — it’s partnering with GE to allow readers to navigate the site in “Flight Mode.”


The campaign was designed to promote GE Aviation’s presence at the Paris Air Show, a weeklong industry event that ends today. In Flight Mode, BuzzFeed becomes a grid of articles, and readers fly over that grid in a little plane. When they alight on a headline that interests them, they just hit the space bar and they can read the article in the normal view.


I don’t know if I’d always want to navigate BuzzFeed (or any other site) this way, but for a few minutes, at least, it’s novel and fun.


President and COO Jon Steinberg told me that BuzzFeed promoted the navigation with a banner on top of its front page for part of last week, and the banner will be reappearing this week, too. In the meantime, anyone can access Flight Mode at any time by visiting this page. The campaign has included additional pieces of flight-themed content, like the video embedded below.


BuzzFeed might not seem like the most obvious choice for an ad campaign tied to a trade show, but Steinberg argued that this is part of a broader trend towards “the consumerization of B2B marketing.” He compared it to the “consumerization of enterprise,” where businesses are starting to use consumer products like Dropbox and Google Apps — in this case, advertisers are realizing that they can reach a business audience through a more consumer-focused site like BuzzFeed.


“People in positions to make purchases in the aviation field, they like engaging content and the same fun stuff as everyone else,” he said.



In some ways, the measurements of success for this campaign are similar to those of other BuzzFeed efforts, as well as for regular BuzzFeed content — Steinberg wants it to drive social media sharing and conversation. He doesn’t expect it to be quite as viral as BuzzFeed’s more consumer-focused efforts, but he’s hoping it sees a little more traction on LinkedIn in addition to BuzzFeed’s “bread-and-butter” sharing on Facebook and Twitter.


I also brought up one of the other big discussion topics around BuzzFeed — whether it can balance hard news reporting with the fluffier content like “This Is What Happens When 140+ Corgis Have A Beach Party.” (Just to be clear — I love the corgi beach party. I should also mention that my roommate Saeed Jones is the editor of BuzzFeed LGBT.)


“Every generation has leisure content next to their serious news,” Steinberg said. The only difference, he said, is that BuzzFeed serves a younger, Internet-savvy audience, so it’s not interested in “an architecture section about $8 million homes,” and instead, “We do animals and Internet culture next to politics and technology.”


As for how advertising, particularly branded, custom content, fits into that equation, Steinberg said:


I think banners have been a terrible ad product for 18 years. … You can be good or bad in your separation between editorial and advertising, regardless of your ad product. We have a total wall here between the people that work on the brands and editorial, and it’s clearly labeled, so I don’t see any tension in it.















New York Assembly Shelves Bill That Would ‘Shut Down' Tesla Sales In The State



Tesla Model S

The New York State Assembly has tabled a set of two proposed bills that would render Tesla Motors’ business model for selling cars illegal in the state.


Tesla’s sales model takes a page out of Apple’s playbook, selling its electric cars through its own branded stores, rather than through third party dealerships.


The bills, which were proposed last week and supported by auto dealers in New York state, would “require that cars can only be sold and registered when sold by a third party, which would be a dealer or a private seller” and ban car companies from seling their wares direct to consumer, Jalopnik reported last week. The measures would be a direct hit to take down Tesla, as it is the only car maker operating in New York with a direct sales business model.


Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk rallied against the proposed bills on Twitter late last week:




Musk can rest easy for the time being, however, since the bills have been shelved. The state assembly’s lower chamber “adjourned its legislative session late Friday without acting on the measure,” AutoNews reports. This means that Tesla is clear to function as is at least through the duration of 2013, as the New York State Assembly is not scheduled to reconvene until January.


Musk credited the bill’s stalling in the Senate to public protest:



It’s good news that the bills have been set aside, but it just goes to show the lengths that entrenched industries will go to fight back against disruption from the new generation of technology-first companies. Tesla’s fight against auto dealers is probably not over yet.















Ecuador, Where Edward Snowden Seeks Asylum, Is No Utopia For Journalists



Flag_of_Ecuador

NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden is bound for the sunnier skies of Ecuador, on this whirlwind tour of countries semi-hostile to the United States. While Ecuador has been a safe haven for world-class leakers in the past, including Wikileaks editor Julian Assange, the country is no utopia for journalists. Given a “Partly Free” rating by Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press scale, their report notes,


“Attacks on journalists and media houses continue to rise. In 2011, Fundamedios, the national press freedom watchdog organization, cited nearly 150 incidents of aggression (physical, verbal, and legal) against the media by authorities as well as by ordinary citizens.”


President Rafael Correa reportedly called the media “assassins with ink.” At least one journalist who criticized Correa’s handling of a police uprising had to flee to Miami after being charged with 3 years imprisonment under the country’s no-so-friendly defamation laws.


Correa has hit back at critics, saying “We won’t tolerate abuses and crimes made every day in the name of freedom of speech. That is freedom of extortion and blackmail.” (Journalists Without Boarders labels Ecuador’s media issues with a pleasant-sounding “satisfactory” rating).


Indeed, Correa could point out that while the rest of the free world is looking to imprison Assange, Ecuador is protecting him in their London embassy. The whole Wikileaks ordeal has lead to a frosty relationship between the U.S. and Ecuador. In leaked diplomatic cables, the U.S. ambassador alleged Correa had promoted a corrupt officer, which prompted Ecuador to expel the diplomat, and for the U.S to then expel the Ecuadorian counterpart in kind.


So, not everyone is convinced that Ecuador is protecting Assange for purely principled reasons. ”There is a huge gap between what Correa says about press freedom and reality,” said César Ricaurte, head of press watchdog group, Fundamedios. “If Assange were Ecuadorean, I dare say he would already be in jail.”


Whether Ecuador is doing this as a public relations stunt, or it has a convoluted stance on press freedom, it appears that leakers have a new safe-haven.












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