“Facebook Gets More Data”→

“Facebook Gets More Data”

Matthew Panzarino has a great take on today’s Instagram + Facebook news:

Facebook doesn’t need Instagram to make money. Instagram will probably never get ads.

I think it’s a win for everyone. Now Instagram doesn’t have to shoehorn a monetization model it would hate —and you would hate — into its service in order to survive. The users get a better experience. Facebook gets more data. Users that are quitting Instagram because the service may be ‘ruined’ are barking up the wrong tree. Facebook sees the value in the network as it is, a photo creation machine with a lot of user love.

While mobile ads could be a huge deal long-term speaking, it is true Facebook doesn’t “need” Instagram to make money right now. For a company as large as Facebook, this kind of acquisitions can be put on hold from a business perspective, to see how things evolve once users figure out they are effectively using a Facebook product. But you can’t put off the mobile explosion – it’s only going to get bigger – and can Facebook afford to miss out on “mobile advertisements done right”? What if someone else figures out a way to monetize millions – soon billions? – of users sharing photos from their smartphones?

It’s a good problem to have. And I agree that access to more data (patterns such as likes matched with photo captions, for instance, or location) is what matters for now. Let’s check back on ads and mobile monetization in six months.

More Instagram + Facebook coverage here.

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Facebook, Instagram, and Ads→

Facebook, Instagram, and Ads

Oli Watts thinks Facebook’s recent statement on revenue from mobile users offers a clear indication of things to come soon in newly Facebook-owned Instagram: ads.

I think the real reason for the Instagram purchase, and the incredible price tag, is access to a potentially lucrative mobile advertising product.

Mobile advertisements are potentially more lucrative than standard “desktop” web advertisements, yet most companies have been doing them wrong for years. The majority of mobile advertisements have tried to replicate the web’s model with simple images users can click to be directed to a website. Others, including Apple with iAd, have tried to do things a little differently, yet the numbers are smaller, and incredibly so, than, say, Google’s revenue with ads on search and desktop websites. Mobile advertisements could keep users more “engaged” with promoted products by leveraging aspects like location, cameras, touch, apps – yet only a handful of companies seem to be betting on the future of ads as richer experiences built for mobile, not extrapolated from computers.

Facebook is a company that along the way found a business model and a culture that allows them to believe they are doing good things. That’s in their IPO filing. With the Instagram acquisition, one can only assume Facebook will want to start making some money with it eventually, and because Instagram is mobile, and photos are huge on mobile, Facebook will find a way to monetize both Instagram and Facebook’s mobile products.

Like Instagram’s photo sharing model applied to a company like Facebook, the potential for different mobile ads is largely untapped.

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Why Facebook Bought Instagram→

Why Facebook Bought Instagram

Om Malik, writing at GigaOM:

Facebook and Instagram are two distinct companies with two distinct personalities. Instagram has what Facebook craves – passionate community. People like Facebook. People use Facebook. People love Instagram. It is my single most-used app. I spend an hour a day on Instagram. I have made friends based on photos they share. I know how they feel, and how they see the world. Facebook lacks soul. Instagram is all soul and emotion.

I am indeed interested to see how, on an emotional level, Instagram users will react to the Facebook acquisition. Will the “love” Om and others mention survive the migration to Facebook’s infrastructure? Or maybe Facebook will really keep Instagram as a truly separate product, perhaps only slightly more integrated with the social network – even if that doesn’t make much sense for a $1 billion acquisition? We’ll see.

In the meantime, it does appear the “social paradigm” Instagram reinvented (here’s my take from 2010) intrigued Facebook enough to give away 1% of its market cap.

Also worth keeping in mind: the photo sharing app Facebook was building, and the popular content on Instagram.

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“Sometime Down The Road”→

“Sometime Down The Road”

Yours truly, writing about the improvements to Instagram’s API in March:

Instagram, on the other hand, is taking an interesting path (no pun intended) that, sometime down the road, might turn what was once an iPhone app into a de-facto option for all future social sharing implementations. A few months from now, would it be crazy to think Camera+ could integrate with Instagram to offer antive uploads? Or to imagine built-in support for Instagram photo uploads in, say, iOS, Twitter clients, and other photo apps? I don’t think so. Just as “taken with Hipstamatic” stands out in today’s Instagram feeds, “Upload to Instagram” doesn’t sound too absurd at this point.

It took 19 days, and “upload to Facebook” has a different ring to it.

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Facebook’s Brilliant Move→

Facebook’s Brilliant Move

Smart take by Dan Frommer on Facebook acquiring Instagram:

The biggest threat to Facebook is a mobile-only or mobile-first social network that captures the increasing amount of time spent on smartphones in a way Facebook can’t or doesn’t.

In my experience, that’s exactly what Instagram does. I’m still addicted to Facebook on the old desktop-browser web, but when I’m on my phone, I gravitate to Twitter and Instagram. Path is another example, but Instagram is more developed — that’s the deal I’d make, too.

That’s exactly what Facebook should be doing: take the photos experience, and invest on a more intuitive way to share quickly and nicely from a mobile device. Instagram was the best choice.

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The Obvious Ending Of Instagram’s Tale

Earlier today, Facebook announced it has “agreed” to acquire Instagram, the popular photo sharing service that recently launched an Android app, adding 1 million users in 12 hours to its existing 30 million iPhone users. Here’s Instagram’s announcement, Zuckerberg’s post on Facebook, and some nice numbers for context. Both companies say Instagram “isn’t going away”, though they will be working on expanding the network while keeping the Instagram “we know and love”. If it sounds confusing on a practical level, here’s how we can put this announcement in perspective.

Unlike Flickr, Facebook didn’t miss out on mobile (its iPhone app is the most popular free app on the App Store, ever), but unlike Flickr, Facebook is also many experiences in one. Facebook is the social network, not just the photo network or the bookmark network. Facebook is none of them and all of them at the same time. And as such, Facebook understands that the mobile photo sharing aspect of the social network could be done better.

How better? Instagram better. Even without a business model – something the company has been criticized for not figuring out on day one – Instagram amassed more than 30 million users in roughly 2 years, and it has somehow redefined the way we think of photos shot quickly, modified, and shared on the go on multiple social networks. Photos that don’t require a sign up to be seen, but that do require registered users to “like” and comment. Photos that, even if not of the highest quality, still appeal to the mobile user who wants to touch up his picture of food or a concert with some nice, vintage-like filters. Instagram is fast, intuitive, and free to use for anyone.

Some are already comparing Instagram’s acquisition to Google buying YouTube years ago. I can see the similarities, but there are some differences to keep in mind. Whilst Google’s publicized core product, search, hasn’t directly benefitted from YouTube, Google’s real business, advertising, certainly has in some way. With the Instagram acquisition, I do believe Facebook knows the app is fascinating because it is an app, separate and fun to use, rather than a complicated interface for the big, large network with thousands of features. And I think Facebook could figure out a way to keep the essence of Instagram alive, at least from an interaction perspective, while altering the network in ways to bring tighter integration with Facebook profiles.

The obvious hypothesis is that Instagram could remain a separate product – maybe just rebranded “Instagram by Facebook” – to become the Facebook app for photos. Facebook already has a dedicated Messenger app for messages; they understand that Facebook is so complex and rich now, people want some experiences of it to become standalone, more intuitive products. Photos are perhaps the biggest experience of Facebook – well, aside from the concept of “friending” itself – and Facebook must have figured out mobile users want to be able to shoot, edit, and share in seconds. They also must have noticed how users liked Instagram’s self-contained approach to a feed of photos that tell stories without necessarily using text captions. So perhaps Facebook could leverage its most visual experience yet – the Timeline – to integrate Instagram in a way to ensure photos are automatically saved in a dedicated album, nicely laid out on Facebook.com, but also available as a separate, still Facebook-made feed that only displays photos.

The “Facebook app for photos”, indeed: allow users to easily migrate Instagram accounts to Facebook, turn old Instagram comments and likes into Facebook’s versions of the same things, allow users to enjoy Instagram as a way to a) post photos, b) share them publicly, and c) have a feed of photos from friends or people you follow. It helps that Facebook has already enabled Subscriptions, which could be translated to Instagram followers. The transition should be simple, technically speaking; Facebook could benefit from a product that already has some users that are sharing to Facebook anyway, and that seemingly like the whole idea of filters.

Facebook was already playing around with that idea, too.

But will the transition be simple from a conceptual perspective? As with most popular acquisitions these days, nerds – who tend to be early adopters of social products – react with outrage and disbelief to news like today’s one.

There are five stages of web grief:

  • Disbelief
  • Outrage
  • Data exporting
  • Account deletion
  • “Five best alternatives to [x]”

In two hours, we have already seen all these headlines. You can love or profoundly hate Facebook, and I’m no judge of your criticism for Zuckerberg’s company. I am just trying to make some sense out of this.

There are some people who fell in love with Instagram, and now don’t accept the fact the company “sold out” to Facebook. It’s an understandable sentiment, as Facebook clearly will try to do something to connect its network with Instagram, otherwise they wouldn’t spend $1 billion. These are the people that liked Instagram because it was a social, but intimate, fun experience to share photos. A separate network with very few features, a focus on photos, and a general feel of “independence” that contributed to its rise to 30 millions. We all root for the small guys to succeed in this era of recession and corporate acquisitions. These people don’t simply fear Instagram will lose its “cool” – they are genuinely concerned their data is going to be acquired by Facebook. That’s why Facebook must be careful in how they figure out a migration from Instagram to its large network. But as for the factors above, there’s no doubt Instagram will lose its product independence eventually.

Some people, however, are more judgmental. They seem to think that every business is a mission, and that we’re all in this intricate, complex Web labyrinth to change the world one app at a time. We are not. A very few people, the Steves and Bills of this modern age, are in for the long haul – to change the way we think, and the way we live through technology. But the majority of founders – even the most passionate ones – run businesses as they should: like a business. With real money, not just ideals, to administer at the end of each month. With employees to take care of and investors to respond to. With privacy concerns, legal departments, offices, salaries, support teams, and families waiting at home, wondering why you’re sweating so much for a website anyway. Instagram is a startup with 10 employees, two co-founders, a lot of users, and no business model to start making money. Facebook comes in and offers $1 billion. What is Instagram going to say, no?

I am not saying what Instagram did was “right”. Let’s get real, it’s not about “right” or “wrong”. It’s a business. And if the solution to this business happens to be a huge social network with lots of money in the bank, and possibly a decent existing structure to migrate our product without screwing our users too much, even better. Facebook and Instagram did the obvious thing: they understood they needed each other and got together. The outcome of this choice is more blurry for now, because while Instagram gets the money, Facebook will have to do things right and figure what makes Instagram great, keep it alive, and improve on it while further connecting it to Facebook. I do hope Instagram will be kept around for the long term.

As usual, the users decide. If you are using Instagram on a daily basis, and you are sending all your photos to Facebook, then maybe this announcement won’t change anything, and perhaps you’ll enjoy some new Facebook-only perks too. If you are concerned about privacy, think Instagram has no way to work as a Facebook product, or generally don’t like the idea of a “Facebook owned” service, then you are perfectly justified to delete your account.

But we should stop thinking about web services as experiences bound to stay independent to change the world, because that is a bubble. The obvious ending is what’s best for the business.

Marked 1.4: A Little Something for Everybody

What started out as a companion app aimed at tech bloggers writing articles in Markdown has become a multipurpose Swiss Army knife for previewing scripts, stories, and code for writers and programmers. While Marked has always fulfilled my needs for finalizing drafts, copying HTML output into a web editor, and checking to see if I’ve overused various positive adjectives, the latest version adds an abundance of new features that make previewing articles in realtime even more useful. It’s important to note that Marked 1.4 is compatible with Lion only — Snow Leopard and Leopard users won’t be able to take advantage of the latest features.

What’s useful to bloggers:

Three changes have a direct effect on my workflow: Scroll to first edit, which moves the document to the current edit point when changes are detected; HTML highlighting, which makes scanning HTML output easier than before; and popovers on external links, which will bring up options to copy and validate a link. The first two new features work splendidly, with Marked scrolling to the paragraph where I’ve added a link or changed a sentence once I’ve left the focus of TextEdit (my editor of choice) or save manually with ⌘S.

Unfortunately, link popovers don’t work as expected. Instead of hovering the mouse over a link, clicking on the link brings up a popover with the copy, validate, and open-in-Safari options. Link validation in particular is great as it provides a quick way to check a slew of links without having to leave the Marked preview (especially useful if you use [this]: style of link in Markdown). Once the link has been clicked on for the popover, clicking it a second time takes you to the website in your default browser. It seems whether the popover is shown depends on whether the URL has already been checked (document-wide).

A fourth new feature bloggers will love if they’ve written their own Marked styles to match the format of their websites will be per-document styles. Instead of changing the style through the GUI, you can include a brief piece of metadata at the beginning of your document by adding the following: “Marked Style: Your preferred style here” (without quotes). If you create new documents with shortcuts or triggers, you can further automate how it will look in Marked by adding a snippet of metadata — useful when you publish or want to see output for a specific blog. The metadata you add is excluded from the HTML output. HTML output, by the way, has a new toggle in the titlebar.

Lastly, for bloggers concerned about their HTML output, Marked now gives you the option to disable header ID creation. Unless you have a specific need for styling, there’s no reason to have Marked generate an ID per header. I’ve definitely enabled this one.

What’s useful to writers and screenwriters:

Scrivener 2.x projects and Leanpub files are now supported by Marked. Scrivener projects, like .md or .txt files, can simply be dragged into Marked and compiled to provide a live preview of your working content. Pressing ⌘E (open in editor) will take open .scriv files being previewed in Scrivener if you’re reviewing your script and need to make a live change. As you write and save your document, Marked will reflect the changes made.

Leanpub compatibility is a little bit harder to explain. What Marked will allow writers to do with their Leanpub files is merge and compile them so that the documents can be previewed and navigated via a table of contents. To take advantage of this feature, an Index.md file is created and requires that the first line be “frontmatter:” (again without quotes) signifying the Leanpub format. In the Index.md file, you’ll need to add your Leanpub files as sections using a special syntax that’s separated by Markdown headers to designate the book title, chapters, etc. This help page should give you a better handle on how to use Leanpub and multi-file documents with Marked.

Having commented on using table of contents, it’d be wrong of me not to mention its fantastic new search feature. After pressing ⌘T to show the table of contents (which basically groups all of the headers in a Markdown document into a list), you can tap the space bar to quickly type a chapter number or section title. Using the arrow or J/K keys, you can select the section before pressing escape to continue previewing your document. It’s a quick and keyboard friendly way to jump around an expansive document.

What’s useful to programmers:

Programmers get their own automatic syntax highlighting update for code blocks. I found that while it worked well with Marked’s default preview, syntax highlighting often had undesirable results when high contrast was enabled. Highlighting itself is taken care of thanks to highlight.js.

Programmers will also appreciate the ability to create fenced code blocks, which are delimited by tildes or backticks. Languages can be specified, but highlight.js will try to automatically detect one of its 41 supported languages on its own.

For those creating GitHub readmes, the GitHub style has been updated to reflect the most recent changes on the site. In the preferences, a new option has also been added to preserve line breaks in paragraphs, mimicking GitHub’s style if you choose to enable it.

Other changes:

Two new themes have been added to Marked: Amblin and Upstanding Citizen. Amblin, laid-back and traditional, is a polar opposite of Upstanding Citizen’s bold centered headers and condensed paragraphs. Amblin is great for writing cozily late into the night — it’s ousted Swiss for me as far as the default styles go.

The preferences panes are all brand new — options are easy to find and are nicely separated into convenient sections. If you plan on printing documents, you can force page breaks with a break snippet, by using horizontal rulers, or before H1 and H2 headers (this printing section should give you a quick primer on the options you have available).

No longer catering to just mainstream tech reporters, Marked has expanded its role from a nerdy Markdown utility to a polished, multipurpose tool that’s bent on making sure any craftsman of words can output a good looking document. More than just a preview app, Marked is feature rich without being complex, presenting files as you want them while providing numerous ways to do simple things from copying text to getting HTML output of your files. Support for Leanpub and Scrivener only adds usefulness for authors using Macs to produce upcoming books, and screenwriters can look forward to added compatibility with Fountain in the future.

Marked provides a lot in an accessible package, and for only $3.99 it’s a steal for anyone who works with Markdown files and its derivatives. You can check out Marked online and download it from the Mac App Store.

“Bartending” by Stephen Hackett Shows The Human Side of Apple Retail

In the past months, I’ve read a lot of books about Apple, and in particular about Steve Jobs. Bartending by Stephen Hackett, however, is the only one that struck me as being completely honest and real in the subject it covers: Apple’s retail stores as a genuine, living collection of stories and people. Not just a business.

Bartending: Memoirs of an Apple Genius, is short, direct, and entertaining. You can probably finish it in 40 minutes if you’re in the mood of reading about Apple’s retail employees and the stories of customers who happen to swing by the Genius Bar every day. And if you like a style that’s fun, cuts to the point, and isn’t ashamed of recollecting the real thoughts of an Apple Genius who sees all kinds of customers on a daily basis, I bet you will devour Bartending from cover to cover in less than an hour. It is a pleasure to read Stephen narrate how he helped a woman recover the precious photos of her children after her hard drive failed, or how the iPhone represented a major shift both in terms of audience, and at the Bar.

I like to think of Bartending as more than “a book about the Genius Bar”. Whether or not you are aware of how Apple’s retail behemoth works behind the scenes, Bartending provides a fun and enlightening look at the interactions that occur every day on both sides of the business. In front of and behind the Genius Bar. I think Stephen’s greatest accomplishment with this book is that he explains with a human, friendly tone that, in spite of the gadgets and dollars involved with the business, the people ultimately define the stories we remember. And if the rules can be bent a little for the good of the customer – to “surprise and delight” – even better. That’s what makes this book a story of its own that fits in the Apple Community so well.

Bartending is a must-read. Get it today at $8.99 on Amazon (iBooks-friendly ePub version also available here).