Instagram Hits 100 Million Monthly Users 28 Months After Launch

Instagram 100 millionFrom just two guys at rented desks to a $715 million sale to Facebook, a second wind on Android and a mess of privacy scares, Instagram today announced 100 million people use it every month to share the way they see the world. The startup hedged its bets by being acquired just as it expanded beyond iOS, but despite what it could have sold for now, there’s no disputing Instagram’s success.

Lees meer

Twitter Is Preparing Vine For Sharing Video Within Your Tweets

282626544_9f0bf31634_zIn October, Twitter acquired a company called Vine, which made a video-sharing app which not many people had the chance to use. AllThingsD reported that Jack Dorsey was pushing heavily to get the deal done, believing that video could be a huge part of Twitter’s future success and adoption. Dorsey also reportedly pushed Twitter heavily to acquire Instagram, which didn’t happen. Today, it seems like the company is preparing its video offering for the masses, as its own CEO has been playing around with it by sharing the links. Clearly, this is the type of video that the world wants to see: As you can see, in an expanded tweet, the video auto-plays and loops, which could get extremely annoying very fast. Hopefully Twitter will also release an API update to provide a proper “play button” to avoid this. As Financial Review points out, this would be an “Instagram for video” play, competing against all of the other apps on app stores everywhere that allow you to share and tweet out short-form videos or longer content on YouTube. The report suggests that you will be able to share six second videos on Twitter, and its unknown at this time as to whether it will be launched as a standalone app, as was intended before its acquisition, or if it will be integrated into Twitter’s current apps. Financial Review asked Twitter’s Editorial Director, Karen Wickre about the launch of a video service this week, and Wickre replied: …you’re talking about Vine … but no I don’t think [it’s being launched] quite yet. But I’m not on the product side so I don’t know all the details. When Vine was acquired, we discussed why this is both a good thing and a bad thing for Twitter and its users. Basically, by adding the ability to shoot and ship video to millions of people in real-time, there is a sense of privacy that will be lost by accidental postings, much like you see now with misdirected direct messages. Once this launches, how long will it take for the first news report about an accidental video including six seconds of something nobody on the planet should have ever seen with their eyes. You figure out the rest of that one. With powerful tools, comes powerful responsibility, and video is one of the media types that is going to require an all new set of

Lees meer

Instafocus Tries To Answer The Question ‘What Happens After The Platform Rug Gets Pulled Out From Under You?’

instafocusInstafocus did what many new app startups did: tried to build a business on the back of another, only slightly older and more stable, one. In this app’s case, that bedrock business was Instagram, which was just testing out its wings as a broad-reaching platform with real-time developer API access. But Instagram changed the rules of the game over Christmas, disabling its real-time API, and that meant rough waters ahead for Instafocus.

Lees meer

Instagram Reports 90M Monthly Active Users, 40M Photos Per Day And 8500 Likes Per Second

instagram-logoInstagram reported a few usage stats today, marking the first time it has talked about numbers on its own site since the kerfuffle raised over its terms of service change following the Facebook buy-out. The internal stats show strong engagement, and user growth, rather than a decline in active Instagram members. Part of the discrepancy between the these numbers and third-party doom and gloom reports may have to do with the fact that Instagram is tracking monthly active users, of which it has 90 million, versus the less stable daily active users stat often cited by others.

Lees meer

“Now” App Scans Instagram To Find You Something Fun To Do Nearby

Now Experience Feature DoneYou’re bored at home asking “What should I do?” Meanwhile people nearby are shooting Instagrams of the fun events they’re at. Now is a free iOS app that uses Instagram’s API to sort through photos in real-time, organize those from the same time and place into events, and show you the events as a feed. Now harnesses the powerful Instagram API to help you discover parties, concerts, bar nights, and share them too

Lees meer

Facebook Removes Instagram User Counts From Developer API After Holiday Traffic Confusion

instagram-logoIn the aftermath of a controversial story claiming Instagram’s traffic numbers were down, it looks like the data that was the source of the story has now disappeared altogether. Instagram was in the spotlight, and owner Facebook’s shares tumbled, when the New York Post ran a story between Christmas and New Years Day claiming that the popular photo app’s traffic was falling off a cliff after the controversial introduction, and then reversal, of new terms of service. We and several others cast doubt on how the NYP read those traffic numbers, which came from AppData, and Facebook eventually said they were inaccurate, too. Now that data is no longer there. Facebook tells us that this is to bring Instagram in line with the rest of its own apps, which stopped appearing on AppData in December 2011. “We don’t provide app usage metrics for apps owned or created by Facebook through our API,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’ve updated our API to reflect this for Instragram, which would remove it from AppData’s rankings.” Facebook may need consider a wider change in the relationship between itself and third-party data services that track traffic across Facebook apps. Data on app growth helps developers monitor progress of themselves and their competitors, but it can be problematic if there is a glitch in the data channel, which in turn affects how overall traffic looks. Journalists who don’t understand how services like AppData work can jump to negative conclusions (Insta-gate being one case in point). So, for now, this is what you see on Instagram’s page: On January 7, it recorded 45.8 million monthly active users, as measured by Facebook logins; today: that number is zero. Similarly, for daily active users, there were 8.7 million yesterday (again, based on Facebook logins), and none today. (And I know Facebook has already dismissed the AppData numbers as inaccurate, but worth pointing out that the MAUs were steadily rising, while the DAUs since December 28 had continued to fall, again as measured by Facebook logins.) Elsewhere, there are other signs that Facebook is drawing the curtains on how third parties can track and use their traffic data to draw conclusions about the company. Last week, we reported some numbers, based on research from Benedict Evans, that showed how Facebook is performing on mobile: 192 million on Android, 147 million on iPhone, 48 million on iPad and 56 million using

Lees meer

Tech Companies, You’re Killing Yourself With Scary Legalese. Put Policy Changes In Layman’s Terms

Instagram FearYou always fear what you don’t understand. -Gotham City mob boss Carmine Falconi.

Tech companies need to wise up and end the cycle of pushing policy updates in confusing legal terms, watching press and users alike panic and threaten to jump ship, and then issuing an apology and clarification. The fact is that the outcry is always louder than the apology, and you lose trust.

Lees meer

Instagram Speaks Out On Users’ Concerns About TOS Changes, Will There Be A Beacon-Like Apology?

7448717958_1738735d85_zAs you might have been following this week, Instagram and Facebook made changes to its terms of service that allows Facebook to sell access to user’s photos for advertising purposes. This is much like the backlash that happened with Beacon, in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an apology from the company in 2007. Today, Instagram has responded in a tweet, suggesting that it would be sharing more soon, based on its user’s concerns. What will come of this, we’re not sure of yet. But the fact of the matter is that as more people learn about what the terms of service changes mean, the more uncomfortable they are with sharing photos on the service. People from prominent Twitter users to Mark Zuckerberg’s own sister, have shared their concern about the changes. Here’s what Zuckerberg said in his Beacon apology in 2007: But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better. Many today are wondering what that “we can do better” means now, especially since the company is a publicly traded one with new responsibilities to the public, and its over 1 billion users. Is this type of content usage fair for ads, just because people “agree” to a terms of service, that admittedly most don’t read? That’s the question being asked today, not whether its filters are better than any other app’s. Users were not able to opt-in or out to these new changes, as the voting requirements that Facebook presented were not met by its users. Basically, we saw this coming. Instagram and Facebook might not apologize, but they could at least shed some more light on the changes to educate its users. Some people are already trying to export all of their Instagram photos, causing its suggested export service

Lees meer