Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing
We’ve got a pretty comprehensive range of metadata that gets attached to our photos nowadays. Location, timestamp, people we’re with, gear setup. Up until now, though, we’ve lacked a really clear way to digitally or non-verbally share the fluffier experiential and emotional metadata that shines through when we talk about our images.
That’s where Instagram steps in. Like a regular photograph, the base data is visual data. However, unlike a traditional photograph, Instagram captures all of the regular metadata and then goes one step further, giving people the opportunity to assign emotional metadata about their experiences, in the form of its seventeen different filters.
Nonetheless, Peter Chernin’s announcement shows us the future of Twitter: a media company writing software that is optimized for mostly passive users interested in a media and entertainment filter.
Though my usage of Twitter was declining over time anyway, this is what finally drove me out.
I’m wondering if I’m just not that “social” in the “social media” sense.
In Square Wallet, the Apple Store, and Uber: Software Above the Level of a Single Device starts with a quote from Dave Stutz, and ex-Microsoft-employee:
Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come. Stop looking over your shoulder and invent something!
Later, Tim mentions Square. His paragraph captures why Square excites me:
If you’ve never experienced the magic of walking into a coffee shop, having the cashier glance down at their iPad-based Square Register to verify your face and payment credentials already provided by your phone’s automatic check-in, and buying your coffee simply by confirming your name, you haven’t yet tasted the future.
As with the iPod Mini in 2004, which I bought on the day of release, I can’t see many reasons to choose a full size iPad over the iPad Mini. In fact, I only see one: the retina display. Next year that’ll be on the Mini. Just like the iPod Classic, I can see the iPad being quickly relegated to a distant second on sales.
For 1.5, I’m adding a feature to One to Watch which allows you to flag a film as Watched. It’s a classic example of a feature where the technical implementation is significantly simpler than how to present the feature in the app’s interface.
Keeping watched and unwatched films in the same list is problematic: watched films might start to crowd out unwatched ones. Until now, the only way to avoid that problem was to delete films you’ve seen. However, it’s useful to know which films you’ve watched. For example, when asked to recommend a film, it’s good to be able to review the ones you’ve seen rather than trying to pull them from memory.