I’m not entirely sure why Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. It doesn’t solve a personal pain point. But someone asked me about the deal, so … here we go.
Instagram’s user value is instant gratification:
- The time I most to want to share a photograph with friends is right after I take it. If I have to interact with other apps on my phone, or (heaven forbid) upload the pictures to my computer, photo sharing becomes less fun and more chore. Or I’m just going to forget to upload / send the photo to my friends. Instagram makes it easy to share the picture immediately, all within one app.
- It’s hard to take a good photo on a phone — even if the phone has high quality camera, the phone may be shaped awkwardly, hands are unsteady, etc. Instagram’s filters quickly makes photos “acceptable” for sharing. Of course, I could edit the photo in a photo-editing app on my laptop, but that means I can’t share my photo right away.
- Likewise, let’s say you take a photo of your friends and it’s sort of “meh”. Should you take another photo or is this fixable with some Photoshop filters? You can’t ask your friends to hang around while you fool around with Photoshop. On the other hand, Instagram lets you know right away.
- Instant gratification generates positive feedback loops. If you take a photo and Instagram makes it look awesome, you’ll want to take another photo. You’ll also want to share it. Sharing makes the Instagram community seem more active, which attracts new users. It also makes existing users want to come back and check for new content.
More … In light of legislative acronyms like USA PATRIOT, PROTECT IP, E-PARASITE, and STOCK, I propose the The No Acronym Must Be Left Alive Act:
Sec. 1 – The Comptroller General of the United States shall have the power to declare that any piece of proposed legislation is silly.
Sec. 2 – For the purposes of sec. 1, legislation is silly if a substantial factor in how it was named was creating a contrived acronym.
Sec. 3 – The Comptroller General shall provide adequate notice that a piece proposed legislation has been declared silly, preferably by posting a yellow sticky note on his office door.
Sec. 4 – Once legislation has been declared silly, the sponsors of said legislation shall deposit $100 into a jar outside the Comptroller General’s office. The proceeds of this jar shall go towards reducing the national debt.
Sec. 5 – If the sponsor of silly legislation fails to comply with Sec. 4 in a timely manner, any member of the public shall have the legal right to deposit one (1) dead fish on the sponsor’s office desk.
There’s a lot of outcry over how pending copyright legislation (SOPA (PDF), formerly known as E-PARASITE, in the House, and PROTECT IP (PDF) in the Senate) would “break the Internet”. Hyperbole aside, the bills would enable the Attorney General and rights holders to go after payment processors, domain name registrars, and the like to disable access to “foreign” websites that infringe U.S. intellectual property rights.
My concern is that the bills are overbroad. They take down too much non-infringing speech in order to get at the stuff that does infringe upon copyright. I’m not sure whether the Supreme Court would hold that the bills abridge free speech rights under the First Amendment, but they would have a serious chilling effect upon free speech.
For example, suppose that the Russian equivalent of Google’s Blogger service hosts infringing content — say, at blogger.ru/piratedmovies. Suppose also that this is the only piece of infringing content and that the vast majority of content on blogger.ru is stuff like critiques of Dostoyevsky and recipes for borscht. Under Sec. 102 of SOPA, the Attorney General can obtain a court order to block off all U.S. access to blogger.ru. While the Russian operators of blogger.ru could, in theory, appear in a U.S. court to dispute the Attorney General’s actions, it’s unlikely that the operators of a Russian language website are going to go to that effort for the handful of American users interested in its Borscht recipes. Collectively though, this would block off Americans from a lot of “foreign” Internet account. It would, in effect, create a “Great Firewall of America”.
More … Building Windows 8 is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs to follow.
I probably won’t agree with all of UI choices being made with Windows 8, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty to gripe about when it finally comes out. But the one thing you get from Windows 8 blog is that Microsoft spends a lot of time thinking about their UI choices and trying to make their users happy. For example, the team uses a good chunk of this blog post to explain concepts like Fitts’ Law and minimizing the amount of time to launch an app. Arguably, some of the “big picture” stuff gets lost with this attention to very specific metrics. But you get the sense that a lot of care is going into Microsoft’s Windows 8 UI.
Contrast this to Google’s new UI changes.
One of the most atrocious implementations of the Google’s new gray, black, and red theme is the new Google Reader. I’ll defer to criticism from folks more familiar with the product. But suffice to say, the new Google Reader redesign raises the question of whether anyone on the team actually put the product in front of real people.
I remember stories about how how Google conducted massive amounts of AB testing on even tiny changes to the interface. Engineers would analyze each extra link on google.com or use of a different shade of blue. Guess that’s not being applied across the board.
I get the impression that Google’s UI team really wants to be like Apple. Like there’s some creative overlord that just imposes “freshness” and “good taste” across each of Google’s products in a consistent manner. Well, I don’t know how Apple works. But whatever it does, Google’s doing a piss poor job at imitating it.
I might post more about deliberative polling later, but I was poking around and struck by the similarity of these two images.
I wish had larger versions of the photo, but I couldn’t find one.