They're doing the "tap for photo, hold for video" thing too. I thought there was a patent dispute around that?[1] Is that resolved now?
Introducing Instagram Stories
71–80 of 102 posts
Re: Introducing Instagram Stories
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
For marketing, which has been positive for a lot of artists. It's definitely allowed people to get their works out there, but let's not act like it's for serious photography.
> but let's not act like it's for serious photography. I (strongly) disagree. There is some incredible work on Instagram from (many) thousands of 'amateur' and professional photographers alike. "Serious photography" isn't just restricted to DSLRs/MF/etc. In many ways, the constraints of mobile photography (lower res, fixed focal length, small viewport when consuming) has benefits, just like constraints elsewhere in p…
They are using Instagram as an easy publishing platform. It's assured the big ones find it very lucrative. The biggest issue with Instagram is all of the bullshit accounts with millions of users, that are just posting the work of other artists with a "credit" if they are lucky.
Re: Introducing Instagram Stories
#73Instagram, instead of focusing on making important improvements to its own app and platform, decide to clone Snapchat. Color me surprised. Things that are shit with IG and still require attention: - there is no real onboarding experience [1] - good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query as a user [2] - good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query as a develop…
> - There is still a lack of support for HD photography.
Another is support for panoramas is nonexistent. They've abandoned the square format already, but there's still currently a minimum w:h ratio.
Re: Introducing Instagram Stories
#74Instagram, instead of focusing on making important improvements to its own app and platform, decide to clone Snapchat. Color me surprised. Things that are shit with IG and still require attention: - there is no real onboarding experience [1] - good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query as a user [2] - good luck contacting a human that works at Instagram with a support query as a develop…
One more thing to add on your list: spamming is ruining the entire experience. For a company that sells AI as the next big thing, not being able to detect accounts following 5000 people, having 8 followers and posting thousands of comments "GET 1000 FOLLOWERS ON [URL]" every day is kind of a joke.
As someone with a small-medium sized account (~2k followers), I currently get ~10–20 spam followers per week. I aggressively report as spam + block, but it's a nuisance.
Their reporting flow has so many taps and steps that it feels like it's designed to be inefficient to give them less requests.
Re: Introducing Instagram Stories
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to other major legal restrictions, the latest API update crossed a line for accessing your own posts; now you can only retrieve 20 of the most recent entries and pagination has been disabled. Yes, Instagram legally owns your data, but now they are actively preventing you from accessing it as well.
Isn't that only for applications in sandbox mode?
Damn. I have several personal scripts related to aggregate and backing up my Instagram account that will break from this. It sucks that accessing your own data is blocked by their approval process [which does not approve everything].
Re: Introducing Instagram Stories
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, only in sandbox mode. Once your app goes live, the 20 post limit is removed.
Have you gone through the approval process? The accepted use cases are very restrictive, and specifically do not support allowing you to access more than 20 of your own posts. "I want to display hashtag content and public content on my website." "This use case is not supported. We do not approve the public_content permission for one-off projects such as displaying hashtag based content on your website. As alternative…
That's kind of bullshit on their part.
This is the kind of thing that causes people to circumvent their API management layer...
Re: Introducing Instagram Stories
#77What's funny about this thread is it's almost all people complaining about dev experience, APIs, etc and saying IG is dead... Meanwhile their customers are very happy and very active. Look at how many snaps you see on your snapchat right now and then go look at how many IG stories have already been posted in the first couple hours. I'd say that was a successful launch. Nit picking things, as a developer, i understand…
I agree, seems to be a lot of anger/hate on the developer side of things, but it's a smart move on IG's side from a user and business strategy perspective.
I was having a similar discussion with someone else on a duplicate of this post, so thought I'd share some of my thoughts here as well since they're especially relevant to your comment. The general point of the prior discussion was that IG was simply cloning SC, and might do better by releasing it as a separate app vs inside their main app. But by releasing it within their main app will result in certain failure since SC's crowd of tweens/millennials wouldn't leave SC.
[my responses with minor edits]
I disagree, I think integrating it with their main product is the perfect way to release this. Just look at Periscope ( and Vine ) living as separate products from Twitter, vs FB releasing FB Live deeply embedded into their primary product. The likelihood of the mainstream user's willingness to try out and adopt the new product/feature is increased.
And in this case, I think all the additional features that comes with IG Stories is actually very cohesive with the rest of IG's core experience. All the new stickers, overlays, filters, and I'm sure they'll be adding the same animated video filters are all very natural extensions of the IG user experience.
So many people use Snapchat as a photo/filter editor to then share on IG/Twitter/FB, now they can do that very same experience directly in IG and share it with their existing fans.
And maybe an overlooked aspect is IG's better UX vs snapchat's bizarre stubbornness to maintain their user antagonistic UX.
But I think it's just as telling with SC's recent spate of features that are moving away from the ephemeral nature of the app ( ie Memories ). Where you can store or save Snaps or Stories.... oh you mean sort of like a personal gallery? And now you want to view a collection of the latest/most popular collected snaps from your friends? oh you mean like a newsfeed?
Bottom line is that the photo/messaging apps are converging. And I don't think there's necessarily any loyalty to a particular platform especially if they have very similar features. The crowd will move to the platform where their friends are, and where the celebs/bloggers/artists/influencers are. And IMO I think IG has a slight advantage with that group at this point because of the non-ephemeral nature of their app which led/leads more naturally to those types building their 'brand' and following. Nobody wants to spend hours and energy creating content that simply disappears. But these types have followed the crowd onto SC and lived by the SC rules, but I'd have to believe they would prefer the other model if they had a choice.
So I guess what I'm saying is that these 2 apps are converging to the same point, albeit from different ends of the spectrum with differing pressures. And once they reach a certain level of parity, loyalty to a platform goes out the window, and being able to capture the cool kids and influencers will be the key to where the rest of the crowd goes. So I don't think it's 'certain failure' from IG's point of view, and certainly still anyone's game.
Re: Introducing Instagram Stories
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to other major legal restrictions, the latest API update crossed a line for accessing your own posts; now you can only retrieve 20 of the most recent entries and pagination has been disabled. Yes, Instagram legally owns your data, but now they are actively preventing you from accessing it as well.
Are you implying that the /users/self/media/recent endpoint now ignores the count, min_id and max_id parameters?
It appears that the result set is overridden in sandbox mode.
Re: Introducing Instagram Stories
#79What's funny about this thread is it's almost all people complaining about dev experience, APIs, etc and saying IG is dead... Meanwhile their customers are very happy and very active. Look at how many snaps you see on your snapchat right now and then go look at how many IG stories have already been posted in the first couple hours. I'd say that was a successful launch. Nit picking things, as a developer, i understand…
By customer, are you referring to (free) consumers or business that pay IG for advertising?
Looking at the latest update of Instagram (v9.0 on iOS), the Stories feature does not seem to be accessible for my account to try it.
The post makes it sound like no one has it yet:
> Instagram Stories will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks on iOS and Android.
Re: Introducing Instagram Stories
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah anecdotally, my in app time for Snapchat vs Instagram flipped once they changed the feed. Twitter was even worse, I don't use it anymore. How insane would it be if your email inbox didn't sort chronologically? I don't know what cohorts Facebook is looking at. Are they seeing a drop in engagement but balance it doesn't matter because of the revenue stream from advertisers? Or may be the bulk of users have increas…
I never understood why they couldn't just give people the option to retain the chronological sorting.. It can't possibly be that difficult to give users the choice.
This lets them experiment with showing ads at the most optimal times. I don't believe the new feed is about anything other than ad money.