Facebook Application

Why Facebook Keeps Carving Itself Up

Facebook Camera Has Branding Issues
Facebook Camera has branding issues

The successful release of the Facebook Camera app two weeks ago marked the second major application launch by the social network focused on a singular feature. Joining Messenger, Camera allows users to enjoy functionality without the baggage of Facebook’s leviathan social networks as experienced through the iPhone, iPad, Android and mobile web versions.

For the past few years, Facebook dominated the social network marketplace by absorbing every feature from all of its competitor. In doing so, it became the McDonalds of social networks. However, with mobile revolution, tactile input changes the way we interact online, and Facebook’s girth makes it unwieldy for tablets and smartphones in spite of experience-controlled applications.

At every corner now, there seems to be a niche mobile competitor.
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The Inevitable Pinterest Post

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Image by Social Graphics

Sigh. If you are a social media pundit, you had better be posting about Pinterest these days or as Ike says, you’ll have your expert card pulled (the horror). So here it is, my inevitable Pinterest post.

What Pinterest has done right is significantly change the way we interface with social media. By making posts picture-centric, we see ideas and concepts rather than have to read about them. In a mobile, portable media world dominated by tactile input methods (touch screens), this is an undeniable future.

This movement towards visualizing information is also typified by Instagram and Tumblr. You can point to the popularity of Facebook pics, Facebook’s new timeline interface, and Twitpics as further evidence. Finally the infographic movement towards visualizing data as opposed to blogging or writing about a topic is yet another bellwether towards pics instead of words.

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Social Photography: Thoughts and 4 Tips

Ride the Sunset!
Taken mid-air last night with an iPhone 4s.

You may not love Flickr, Instagram or Pinterest, but you can’t deny the continuing rise of social photography. Photos dominate social media. Even on Facebook, the king of networks, people spend 17 percent of their time perusing photos according to a recent ComScore/BuddyMedia study.

Facebook time spent seg

Whether they are retail pics “pinned” on Pinterest, food shots discussed on any social site (25 percent of foodie photo creators do so as part of a daily food diary), or a happenstance shared on Instagram or via TwitPic, photos are a universal staple of the online social world. As such, social photography should be a part of your communications strategy.

The results have been fantastic for me. While this blog has a decent following, in the four years I have written here regularly (some of the old 2007-8 posts were imported from my now defunct Now Is Gone blog), my photo blog on Flickr has generated roughly 50% more page views.

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