I'm big into Instagram so any news about the Apple App of the year 2011 is major news to me. Now something big cropped up today which on the face of it looks small but is actually good - Hipstamatic are the first external app which can post direct to Instagram (full story here).

This is big news because, up to this point, Instagram have tightly controlled which apps can post photos to the stream - mainly no-one but the official IOS app. Posting photos is not in the official API (you can only build gallery apps really) and anyone who tried to reverse engineer the photo posting process was clamped down on.

Note: ccompare this to Twitter where it was open season for any app to post tweets - later on Twitter decided to reign things back in and try to consolidate the apps which people used. Primairly to control the user experience - and it's this experience which Instagram have tightly guarded up to this point.

So why do this now?

This is a good question. Instagram have been scalling up and with the recent news that the Android version is finally on the cusp, it looks like Instagram uptake is about to go into an even higher gear.

So perhaps Instagram are looking partner more as their remit goes beyond the closted confines of the current IOS only party.

Freemium

However, I see another clever move by Instagram here: an implicit freemium model. Hipstamtic aint a free app - Instagram is. Hipstamtic is an amazing app - in fact, it's the camera app which first made me jealous of the iPhone (back when I had a Blackberry for my sins). But as my Instagram fever took hold, Hipstamatc (sadly) took a back seat.

This integration (which means that you can post direct into your Instagram stream from Hipstamatic) puts Hipsta right back into the front line for the IG camp. This deal has allowed Hipstamatic to dip into some of the frictionless sharing magic which Instagram has, up until this point, owned.

I'm pretty sure that Hipstamatic's fortunes have been inversly proportional to Instagram's; as IG grew in popularity; it kept stealing limelight (and usage) from Hipstamatic.This is a shame; Hipsta is a great app and I'm sure the IG team know this as well. This deal throws a lifeline to Hipsta, and I'd say that IG have a strong case to ask for a revenue share in new Hipsta purchases (and in-app purchases). This effectively gives Instagram a paid for "pro" version in everything else but name.

To End

The fact that pictures posted to Instagram from Hipstamatic are branded with a pretty bold link back to the Hipsta app tells me that not only is this about allowing hand picked third party apps to post to IG BUT also to encourage use of those apps - kinda like advertising.

A very interesting move...

p.s. I believe this also effects the other Hipstamatic camera app - the D-Seris disposable camera - tight IG integration here also opens the door to more seamless are interesting photo competition and meetup possibilities.

Ok, so here’s the first poem. Inspired by the increasing collection my brother has on his blog. He fires off at least one a day on his #speedpoem challenge – I’m not ready for that yet, one every couple of weeks will do me for starters. Any way, here’s the poem.

Ps I’m pretty sure I’ve bastardised & plagiarised a load of stuff here (mainly Saul’s). This is therefore a compliment to that!

Varteg Hill

A thin, lonely road threads across the exposed mountain top,

Varteg hill.

Windswept, unforgiving and beautiful.

At a roadside point, not unlike any other, stands a battered and dwindling clutch of flowers; mourning the spot of a not-so-recent tragedy.

Probably a car misadventure. Providing the final stop for some unlucky Saturday night revellers.

What scene confronted the ambulance crew that night? Driving rain & strewn death? High up on that bleak track.

With the mountain looking passively on.

Unmoved by the daily dramas of our working lives.

Note: I am under **no** allusion that these will be any kind of works of art!

# Why do it then?

Well, because it's all to easy **not** to do things like this isn't it?

All to easy to **not** have a go.

Especially for things which open us to criticism; or which makes us feel in anyway vulnerable. All to easy to dodge that bullet by not joining in.

But fuck that. I'm not playing that game any more. I'll have a go at whatever damn well things I like, talent or no talent! :)

Within the last couple of hours it has been announced that Twitter have acquired the light weight blogging platform Posterous (on which this very blog is based). I've been mulling over why this may have happened... 

Obviously I'm mildly concerned from a personal point of view as if Twitter shut the Posterous down, I'll have to find a new blog platform; still, that's not really a major problem; more of a disruption. I've been happily (& freely) using Posterous for years so I can't really complain. 

The big question is though: Is this a straight talent acquisition? Or is this an indicator of a bigger upcoming move by Twitter? 

I can't quite see the unique technical talent that Twitter may have wanted from Posterous (no disrespect to the team, they've done a grand job) so I'm going to throw something out there... 

Google+ a dangerous hybrid?

I think that Twitter are more than aware that Google+ is a pretty special beast brewing. A key quality of G+ for me is that it is a new type of content publishing platform - a hybrid between micro blogging & full scale blogging; sort of a Twitter & a lightweight Wordpress all thrown into one. All this plus something ingrained into the biggest search engine. 

Twitter may well be thinking "ok, we're a great real time micro-blogging platform, can we offer a product which can house a load of the content which people create in the first place?" - typically this has been the territory of blogging platforms such as Wordpress and, of course, Posterous.

Now I'm not saying that Twitter will be changed from the 140 system we know and love but, much like Twitter consolidated the mobile apps to help make the user experience better, perhaps they want a better fitting, more tightly integrated blogging platform for their users to use - create an obvious choice for them. And, obviously, owning a publishing platform would probably extend Twitters monetization options. 

My hopes for the change over are: 

1. That Twitter don't kill Posterous. I kinda like this very lightweight, no-frills system. 
2. That Posterous *finally* have the official Twitter method for embedding tweets! 
3. Semantic headings in post by web; I cannot stand FONT SIZE!!

What do you think?

Joel

Instagram Talk for DigiTalksChelt

Last week I gave a presentation on Instagram to the friendly & switched on crowd over at DigiTalksChelt. I’ve uploaded my slide deck to SlideShare but I also wanted to add a blog post to fill in some gaps & to say thanks.

First off I’d like to say thanks to the people who’s Instagram photos I used to illustrate slides (IG usernames were shown next to any image on slides). So thanks to @cecicatalano, @valemami, @yamilettenicole, @emmaforsberg, @paguerra, @dotted, @dimity_m, @niamhcg, @ivyngmg, @amanda_choquette and @jamieoliver. I didn’t ask folks permission as I assumed it would be ok for a non-profit thing – please shout out if there’s an issue and I’ll immediately remove (I’ll tell affected users via Instagram as well).

Interesting Links

I mentioned a couple of links in the presentation, some interesting ones I found are:

1. Tips on how to tell your brands story using Instagram
2. Brands using Instagram
3. Why Instagram changes the face of marketing? (superb)
4. 25 ideas on using Instagram for Business (another great post from @bernadettejiwa)

Mad Men – The Carousel

And the final link I’d like to mention is not specifically Instagram related but it is something I wanted to show the audience but I didn’t have time; it’s a classic scene from from the excellent Mad Men series set in a fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1950’s America. In this scene the creative director Don is pitching his concept for branding the slide deck to Kodak. The reason I mention this here is because Don talks about nostalgia which I believe is at the heart of the success of Instagram – and by nostalgia I don’t simply mean the use of retro looking filters.

Enjoy.

Mad Men – Best Ad Pitch – The Carousel

Joel

I read something in an article by Clive Walker today which stopped me in my tracks and made me think. Clive’s article was about a HTMl5 & geolocation project he is working on and he was bemoaning time to learn new things & to spend on personal projects. He then struck a big chord with the following where he was complaining of a:

a slight feeling of web and mental tiredness in the evenings and weekends

This is something I find to. Don’t get my wrong, there was a time when I’d be up to god knows o'clock every night playing with the latest web technology or working on a website. The thing is though, you can’t keep that forever.

And nor would I bloody want to.

I have a family now with two kids – lovely little monkeys and I want to remember them growing up. Weekends are pretty much off limits for work expect for general admin on a Sunday night and Twitter & Instagram (and that’s too much for Jess!).

Things weren’t always this way, only about 2 years ago I was working on my own “client-from-hell” project (we’ve all got scarred by those) – I’d under quoted (never again) & was over delivering – basically a nightmare. My brother and his family were over from France visiting at the time and I remember seeing bugger all of them because of this crappy project. When they went back I realised what a stupid waste it had all been and I vowed that I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Work is important. But’s it’s not that important. You’re a long time dead!

Also, there is more to life than the web: I find that if I spend too long doing web stuff, I start to feel hollow & thin; like if you’ve ate too much toast, or bought all your furnishings from IKEA; it’s not enough sustenance – you need to broaden your horizons.

When I get like that I know I need to get out and about; go for a proper walk; with the wind blowing in my face or, better still, a stroll next to the sea. Away from the tech (but not my iPhone ;)

Swimming

Swimming is also a fave of mine – not everyone’s cuppa tea I admit – it’s not exactly a team sport – and the constant laps can be like water torture to some. Not for me though; the exercise has a Zen like effect; paring down the thoughts whizzing through my head, whittling them down to simply concentrating on breathing smoothly and on attempting to glide through the water with the minimum of fuss.

Photography

Photography/Instagram (IG) is great for me; decaying rusty sheds, any texture you just want to run your hand over really appeals to me. And I interact with a community on IG who also appreciate such things. It’s always great to interact with folks with similar interests (however odd!).

Reading (proper reading!)

Reading is something I neglected for years; it’s nuts as, in my (long gone) twenties I was a big reader – especially non work/tech. However I lost that ability somewhere in the insecurity of feeling that there was always something to learn so that meant that you should always be learning. Now that’s sort of right but it does miss an essential point; your mind is a sponge and when full, no attempt to pour on more learning will achieve the desired results. You need time to reflect, time to process what has been learnt. Allow the old guy who lives in your head to take those newly pressed folders of knowledge and to file them away appropriately for future reference: clearing down the decks for new learning to begin. To give yourself some breathing space.

Took me a long time to learn that. Sadly.

Joel

Ps I always like the books of Annie Proulx, if you have any recommendations of books in that vein I’d love to hear them

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About 10 years ago, when I was living in Brighton, it was a friend’s birthday and someone bought her a label gun (one of the old school, turn the dial, crank the handle for some sticky, retro label fun type). So, we all had labels with our names on and progressivey more drunk in a long line of boozers from The Farm down to the Mash Tun & beyond.

Anyhow, my name label stayed on my coat for months afterwards – gently curling at the edges as it aged but still proudly broadcasting “Joel” to the world at large. The ramifications of this would creep up on me unexpected with people saying “there you go Joel!” when paying for a train ticket or something. Yes, it was mildly disconcerting but, at the same time, it was friendly and inclusive. There was something fun & discoverable about it.

Now, I’m not sure where I’m going with this but I do know that location based technologies, smart phones and wearable technology (like the eminently hackable range of Arduino gear) are creating completely new landscapes of opportunities.

I’m not saying that the future is wearable smart badges but I am saying that there are fantastic opportunities thrown up by the crossroads of these technologies; opportunities to tap into lots of fun & discoverable things.

And I also think this is one of those frontiers where, like with Apple, there is absolutely no point in conducting focus groups to ask what folks want – because they just don’t know until they experience it. This is just something we’ll have to figure out for ourselves.

My Arduino kit is on the way so maybe I’ll strike gold in them there hills ;)

The agency had overblown the solution (so they could overblow the costs). The CMS was (I shit you not) a Java admin front end feeding a dark art pasty Perl templating engine. For good measure there was an early version of Tomcat running on another web server (on the same box) handling some horseshit session mapping code.

Funnily enough the whole soup of crap ran like a one legged dog. And, funnily enough (again), it needed some performance enhancement; I had to do some reverse caching tomfoolery with Apache to try to stop this whole Heath-Robinson cack trap grinding to a halt when it served up more than one page (note: I am really thankful of that time for getting my hands down & dirty with Apache config though).

So, I reached a point when I'd had enough of this - especially when a bit of PHP & MYSQL would have been a *much* better fit. I jacked it in and decided to spend a little time on a pet project; well before the money ran out & I had get a contract.

The pet project was called "Planet Details" (I've probably still got the domain name somewhere). It's purpose was to solve the whole problem of authentication on the web; well, at least the bit about having to remember a gagillion website login details. It was written in Perl (mod_perl) and PostgreSQL; why? Who knows, but I've certainly still got a soft spot for Perl to this day.

After a bit of trial and error with the technique to use, the system finally worked like this:

1) you created an account on Planet Details (PD)

2) you added in your login details for your sites (such as hotmail/yahoo etc)

3) (sort of optional) you install a JavaScript bookmarklet

You then navigated around the web pretty freely until you hit a site you wanted to login to.

You then hit the bookmarklet which fired you across to PD.

The bookmarket also did a little bit of magic so that it could tell PD which website you came from.

PD was able to do the key bit of logic, namely: get the login details for the originating website and construct some form submission logic and try to auto submit back to the website.

Hopefully all this would all go well &, hey nonny nonny, you would be logged in to (say) Yahoo.

The funny thing was that it worked. Kind of.

The thing is that, as you know, all websites are different - and, certainly back then, each website's login system is different. I remember having to jump through hoops for one site or another because I needed to send back the original session ID from the cookie (or some such).

And some websites were weird. Yahoo, for example, had lots of different services you could log back in to - it's not just a one login form/one website setup. And so the database had to be quite complex.

This sort of annoyed me as it made the overall solution more complex because of 10% of websites which acted this way.

Anyway the point is that I really struggled with what was "just enough" to get PD launched; which was my problem to fix and which were out of my control.

Funnily, my pet project stagnated. It back burnered. Wandered out to the long grass, never to be seen again (apart from today).

The reason I mention this is *not* because I think PD could have made me a fortune (I wish!) but knowing what I know now I realise that I had a complete lack of start up mentality and, fundamentally, I had a severe problem of *execution*. An inability to stop fannying about actually just bloody get on with the thing.

It's really hard to know when something is good enough - and if you don't know that then projects like PD stay in the laboratory - they remain in the closeted workshop of your own skunkworks. Never to be tested in the wind tunnel of public opinion.

And yes, PD is only *one* of many projects kicking around in the James Bond equipment room of my mind.

All badly executed.

So, in recent times, I've tried to get better at executing - just getting on and bloody *doing* things.

One example is a web conference in Newport - been mulling it over for years and the other night decided to just do it - don't worry about what might go wrong - to trust that I can roll with the punches and make it work. And to know that bits that don't work are part of the journey - it can't all be perfect.

There! I feel better for getting that off my chest!

Anything lurking in your laboratory which needs a bit more execution?

Joel

A bit of a random post to just hold some links to accompany my talk today at Newport Uni. I want to impress about the student's who may be entering the world of work for the first time the fact that they need to have a rough, back-of-a-fag packet plan for the next couple of years. Because the next couple of years will unfold anyway, so you may as well try to lay down some tracks and get yourself pointing in the direction you want. 

1) Steve Jobs

Here is the inspiring speach he gave at Standford in 2005.

2) Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary is a force of nature and is someone who has does a fantastic job of realising the power of social media. Check out this ad hoc video he put together to help inspire people to do what they want.

3) Top 5 Death Bed Regrets

". I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

4) THE STUDENT GAP YEAR 2.0

This is my post on how I think students should start getting smarter with how they use social meda.

5) CV Parade

A great site showing different types of CVs - ideal for some inspriration (thanks to @madebyfifty)

6) Ryan Waring

A great post which Ryan Waring kindly knocked up in a hurry for me. Ryan benefited from the Go Wales scheme and was very proactive in hunting out who he wanted to work for - his work is now talking him to Australia. Read it here.

Final Thoughts

If you need to bounce any ideas around about how you get to work in this or that sector, what you should do, who you can speak to, then please do not hesitate to shout out. I may be able to point you in the right direction.

@Joel_Hughes