The network's the thing

Last week Instagram announced it was supporting more than just square aspect ratios for photos and videos. This led of course to a Slate article decrying the move, because Slate is that friend that has to be contrarian on every topic all the time, just to be annoying.

The square confines Instagram users to a small area of maneuver. It forces us to consider what details are essential, and which can be cropped out. It spares us from indulgence of the landscape and the false promise of the panorama.
 

But Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is in the business of accommodating its users, not challenging them. One of the problems with the square, the company explained in its announcement, is that “you can’t capture the Golden Gate Bridge from end to end.” This example speaks to the needs of a certain kind of Instagram user who enjoys planting his flag on settled territory. Like an iPhone videographer at a Taylor Swift concert, the guy Instagramming the Golden Gate Bridge is not creating a rare or essential document, only proof that he saw it with his own eyes.
 

And why did he bother doing that, anyway? Clearly, because photographs cannot really capture the scope of the Golden Gate Bridge, or St. Peter’s Basilica, or the view from your car window as you drive up the Pacific Coast Highway. The impulse to capture these moments on camera is shaded by the knowledge that the moment, in all its immediacy, is too large to fit in a frame of any size.
 

I don't think my friend who snapped a pic of her daughter this morning or the friend who memorialized the little leaf the barista made in the foam on his latte was contemplating how wonderful it was that they were sparing me from the “indulgence of the landscape and the false promise of the panorama” but what do I know. I'm fairly certain the guy Instagramming the Golden Gate Bridge (I've done that a few times on Instagram) realizes he's not “creating a rare or essential document” but it never hurts to remind him, I'm sure he appreciates being set in his artistic place.

I'm glad Instagram is accommodating the additional aspect ratios, and it's a sign of how powerfully their network has matured. People confuse arbitrary limits on social networks—Twitter's 140 character limit, Instagram's square aspect ratio and limited filters, to take two prominent examples—with their core asset, which is the network itself. Sure, the limits can affect the nature of the content shared, but Instagram is above else a pure and easy way to share visual content with other people and get their feedback. That they started allowing videos and now differing aspect ratios doesn't change the core value of the network, which is the graph.

In fact, this move by Instagram validates the power of their network. If they were failing they either wouldn't have survived long enough to make such a move or it would be positioned as some desperate pivot. Instagram is dealing from a position of strength here, expanding the flexibility of its tools to meet the needs of a still growing user base.

In the same way, Twitter should have lifted the 140 character limit on DMs much earlier than they did. The power of Twitter, deep down, is that it's a public messaging protocol. The 140 character limit is not its secret power. The network is.

I'd actually remove the 140 character limit on Tweets as well, though such a move would undoubtedly spawn even more of a public outcry than Instagram's move since so many power users of Twitter are journalists. Yes, a 140 character limit enforces some concision in writing, rewarding the witty among us, but it also alienates a lot of people who hate having to edit a thought multiple times just to fit in the arbitrary limit. Lots of those people abandoned Twitter and publish on Facebook instead. Twitter could always choose to limit how much of a Tweet to display in the Timeline so as to allow for a higher vertical density of Tweets in the timeline, when people are scanning.

Look at how many users of Twitter have to break long thoughts across multiple Tweets, in Tweetstorms or just long linked series of Tweets. Many of those are power users, yet I still see power users do it incorrectly every day, making it really difficult to follow the entire sequence. Users who want to link tweets in a Tweetstorm or just to link their own Tweets together in a series should reply to each of their Tweets, removing their own username in the process. This allows readers who click one tweet to easily see the rest of the Tweets in the series, and removing one's own username adds back some characters for the content and prevents it from seeming as if you're talking to yourself like a crazy person. That many have no idea how to do it is just one of Twitter's usability issues. It's a wonderfully elegant public messaging protocol, but its insistence on staying so low level is crazy. Don't even get me started on putting a period before a username in a Tweet, try explaining that to your mother with a straight face.

Here's another example. Look at how many experienced Twitters users now turn to apps like OneShot to attach screenshots of text to their Tweets as photos, to circumvent the 140 character limit. I happen to really enjoy those screenshorts, as they're sometimes called now, and they demonstrate how Twitter could expand their 140 character limit without overwhelming the Timeline: just truncate at some point and add a click to expand function. This is yet another example of users generating useful innovation on top of Twitter when it should be coming from within the company.

Rather than force users to jump through all these hoops to publish longer content, Twitter could just allow users to write more than 140 characters in one Tweet, truncating the whole of it after some limit and posting a Read More button to allow readers to see the rest of the thought. Blasphemy! many will shout. I can already see the pitchforks in the distance. Some good old blasphemy is just what Twitter needs.

Longer character limits would likely increase the ability to follow conversations and dialogues on the service, too. One of the wonderful things about Twitter is that conversations between specific users can be read by other users. That's one of the greatest things about Twitter as a public messaging protocol. But because replies have to fit within 140 characters, often they need to be broken up into multiple Tweets. Many who reply don't realize that unless they hit the reply button on the previous Tweet in the conversation, the dialogue link is broken. Many mistakenly compose a new Tweet to continue the dialogue, not realizing that any reader clicking on that Tweet will not automatically see other Tweets in that conversation. Instead, it will just display by itself, as an orphan.

I run into this multiple times every day on the service, clicking on a Tweet without any easy way to figure out what it was in response to. If a lot of time has passed, it's often impossible to piece the conversation back together. It drives me crazy. I tried explaining how to piece broken conversation threads like this back together to a few people who abandoned Twitter and then realized I sounded like a madman. Why, in this day and age, should they have to learn such low level nonsense? Threaded conversations are, for the most part, a solved UI issue in this day and age.

I'm not done with the character limits, so hold your disgust. You may wish to bring more than just your pitchforks after I'm done. Every Twitter conversation that involves more than two people devolves into a short series of retorts that eventually dies because each additional username consumes more of the 140 character limit, until there is no more room for actual dialogue.

It's absurd, but it's always been that way. Why usernames count towards the 140 character limit has always befuddled me. Meaningful conversation always has to migrate off of Twitter to some other platform, for no reason other than a stubborn allegiance to an arbitrary limit which made sense in the SMS age but now is a defect. If you're going to keep a character limit (could we at least double it?), let's not have usernames count against the limit. In fact, if I hit reply to someone's Tweet, do we even need to insert that person's username at the front of the Tweet? You can still send the notification to that user that I replied to their Tweet, and suddenly my reply won't seem so oddly formatted to the average reader. There are plenty of ways to indicate who the message is addressed to through contextual formatting, and if I wanted to mention them explicitly I could always write @username in the Tweet. But it's unnecessary to insert it by default.

Vine is perhaps the only network whose chief content-creation limit seems intrinsically part of the network, and that's because video is one type of content which can't be scanned, in which each additional second of content imposes a linear attention cost of one second on the viewer. A six minute video costs the reader 60X the attention cost that a 6 second video does, and to even create a 6 second video of any interest requires some clever editing to produce a coherent narrative. A Vine video joke has its own distinct pace, it's like a two line riddle, often a 4.5 second setup with a 1.5 second punchline (at least that's the pacing in most Vines in my home feed).

This 6-second limit still constrains the size of Vine's userbase, and they may be okay with that. I think that's fine. I enjoy Vine, it's its own art form. Still, the 6 second limit means a lot of people don't turn to it for a lot of their video sharing. It's not easy to come up with a succinct 6 second video clip.

Look at how Snapchat has evolved to see another company realizing that its power is not the initial constraint but the network. Snapchat still imposes a 10 second limit on video length. But now you can string many videos together into My Story. This was brilliant on their part; it allows viewers to skip any boring clip with one tap, but it allows the creator to tell longer stories simply by shooting multiple snaps in sequence. They lowered the content generation cost on creators without meaningfully increasing it for viewers.

Furthermore, Snapchat now allows you to download your Stories to your camera roll. Those who claim ephemerality is the key to Snapchat's success might panic at such a change, but all it demonstrates is that they realize they now have users for whom ephemerality isn't the main draw of the service. They haven't confused an arbitrary early limit for being the root of their success, and they understand the underlying power of their platform.

Perhaps more than any other social network, Facebook has long recognized that their chief asset is their graph. They've made all sorts of major changes to their interface, changes that always leads to huge initial outcries from their users, followed by a fade to silence as users continue to access the service in increasing numbers.

That they recognized this and had the courage of their convictions from such an early stage is not to be discounted. Plenty of companies live in fear of their early adopters, who often react negatively at any change. This leaves these companies paralyzed, unable to grow when they hit  saturation of their early adopter segment. Because the global market of users has been expanded by the unprecedented reach of connected smart phones, early adopter segments can now number in the tens of millions, confusing companies into thinking that their early adopter segment is actually the mass market.

Twitter, more than any other company, needs to stop listening to its earliest users and recognize that deep down, its core strength is not the 140 character limit per Tweet, nor is it the strict reverse chronological timeline, or many other things its earliest users treat as gospel.

It's not even the ability to follow people, though for its current power users that has proved a useful way to mine some of the most relevant content from the billions of Tweets on the service. If Twitter realizes this, they'll understand that their chief goal should not necessarily be to teach the next several hundred million users how to follow hundreds of people, the way that the early adopters did. To do so is to mistake the next wave of users as being identical in their information consumption preferences and habits as the first 300 million, or whatever the true active count is among that number (I'm going to guess it's in the range of 40 to 80 million truly active daily users, though it's hard to tell without seeing the data).

Twitter's chief strength is that it's an elegant public messaging protocol that allows anyone to write something quickly and easily, and for anyone in the world to see that writing. It's a public marketplace of information. That's an amazing network, and the reason people struggle to describe Twitter is that a platform like that can be used for so many things.

If Twitter realizes that, then they'll realize that making that information marketplace much more efficient is the most critical way to realize the full potential of what is a world-changing concept. How do you match content from people who publish on Twitter with the readers who'd enjoy that content?

A people follow model is one way, but a topic-based matching algorithm is another. Event-based channels are just a specific version of that. Search is one option, but why isn't there browse? I can think of a dozen other ways to turbocharge that marketplace off the top of my head, and the third party developer community, kicked out of the yard by Twitter so many times like stray dogs, could likely come up with dozens of others if they were allowed back in.

Twitter can leave the reverse chronological timeline in place for grumpy early adopters. It can be Twitter Classic. Most of those early adopters are largely happy with things the way they are, and if Twitter is scared to lose them, leave the current experience in place for them. I honestly don't think they'd abandon the service if Twitter raised the 140 character limit, or allowed for following of topics, or any number of other changes suggested here, because I think the power of the network is the network itself, but if the company has any such trepidations, it's not a big deal to leave Twitter Classic in place. The company has a huge engineering and product team, it's easy to park that experience in maintenance mode.

When social networks come into their own, when they realize their power is not in any one feature but in the network itself, they make changes like this that seem heretical. They aren't. Instead, these are fantastic developmental milestones, indicative of a network achieving self-awareness. A feature is trivial to copy. A network, on the other hand, is like a series of atoms that have bonded into a molecule. Not so easy to split.

It's a post for another day, but one of the defining features of our age is the rise of the network. Software may be eating the world, but I posit that networks are going to eat an outsized share because they capitalize disproportionately on the internet. Journalism, advertising, video, music, publishing, transportation, finance, retail, and more—networks are going to enter those spaces faster than those industries can turn themselves into networks. That some of our first generation online social networks have begun self-actualizing is just the beginning of that movement.

“People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I'm flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol... as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.” Bruce Wayne, Batman Begins

Age of abundance, #hashtag edition

People are appending anything up to 50 hashtags to their Instagram posts, carefully researching the most popular hashtags, or formulating individual strategies (here’s a travel blogger explaining hers).
 

Hashtags are a search tool, providing a way to make your content discoverable by people who don’t already know or follow you. In this way, they’re a means of getting attention – and therefore status – in the endless popularity contest that’s metric-driven social media. Excessive hashtag use may be a bid for Instacelebrity, and the ensuing Instacash – with reports of top style bloggers earning $1m per year, and an estimated $1 billion sponsored Instagram post economy - or a sheer addiction to the dopamine hit of the ‘like’ count ticking upward.
 

But as a matter of taste, it all looks… a little grasping.
 

Anyone well versed in social media understands hacks like these to gain distribution for their content. This piece, whose opening is cited above, is much more interesting for its analysis of hashtag use in conveying and reinforcing status.

Let’s start from the principle that hashtag usage is often a bid for attention – you want your content to be discoverable, for more people to see it (and hopefully like it). But visibly betraying a desire for attention is a sign of neediness – and neediness is low status (you are dependent on other people’s behaviour to define your self worth). Therefore:
 

Hypothesis: High status brands don’t use hashtags extensively
 

Evidence:  We find @ChanelOfficial using hashtags, but with two constraints:
 

· A maximum of three per post, often only one
· Almost entirely ‘owned’ hashtags based on their campaign names
 

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Whole thing isn't that long, all worth a read.

I recall being a kid in school, struggling to learn, often painfully, about how my words and clothing and haircut and actions affected how people perceived me, what circles I could enter and which were closed off. A terrifying crucible.

What must it be like to grow up today, not only having to learn the real world signaling prices but also the values of strategies and cultural assets and selfie poses in the social media market? I've heard from many people that if they post something to social media and if it doesn't garner a certain volume of likes within some period of time, they pull it down immediately. Oh the horror of changing your Facebook profile photo and not getting enough likes within the first hour. Every one of these kids a William Masters or Virginia Johnson of social media, exploring the boundaries of what is or isn't acceptable to local and global tribes.

From my limited sample set of observation (yep, it's still a sample set of one), a lot of social media usage cuts along a generational line demarcated by whether you grew up in the age of scarcity or in the internet-driven age of abundance. I don't have data to back this up, but if someone out there does, please let me know.

Older people, who largely grew up in an age of scarcity, publish content to social media and interact or affirm such content carefully. A like from such a person is difficult to earn because they treat it as something that must be earned. The act of giving out such a like also conveys something about the giver, so it is a considered action.

Younger people seem to be more generous and prolific with content, likes, etc. They've grown up in an age where everything digitizable is available on demand, from TV shows and movies to music to photos to articles. Their likes are freely given, and plentiful, often used more as a read receipt than a standing ovation.

It makes sense if viewed from an abundance economic framework. Likes are an infinitely replenishable virtual good, and if it adds some happiness to the recipient, what's the harm? Perhaps everyone would be happier if we all liked and favorited more frequently, more generously. Social media need not be a zero sum game.

The other view, that of scarcity, is that we'd just be reinforcing coddled millennials who, in receiving affirmation for everything, receive it for nothing. Damn these sensitive unemployed self-promoting kids with their need for trigger warnings and their impulse to take offense at even the most harmless of jokes!

The piece quoted up top comes full circle by the end.

High status social media usage often demands that the labour of working at one’s social media persona be concealed. As with beauty, status is something one is supposed to attain effortlessly – and should the frantic paddling below the surface be revealed, that is vulgar, a faux pas.
 

This is why Kim Kardashian is so interesting – because she, almost uniquely, does not pretend she #wokeuplikethis, but instead makes the artifice of her social media persona not only evident but into a published art photography book, the brilliantly entitled ‘Selfish‘. In this way, Kardashian (and also Amalia Ulman,) make the ‘Oh me? I’m not self-promoting’ hashtaglessness of Chiara Ferragni et al. look like the studied pose it really is.
 

Hyperproliferating hashtag useage is thus interesting as one potential tactic to invert social media ‘good taste’.
 

What more suitable patron saint of the age of abundance than Kim Kardashian, who finds every opportunity to shove her ample, or shall we say abundant, derriere in the public's face through all possible social media channels.

The most scarce play she's made is releasing an actual physical coffee table book that costs $9.97, at last count, on Amazon, and includes photos not released on Instagram before. I suspect these first several customer reviews are from the scarcity school of thought.

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kadryov_95

Ramzan Kadryov, the head of the Chechen Republic, has just under a half million followers on Instagram. A quick glance shows he's a frequent poster, up there with the best of this digitally extroverted generation.

So when he lost his iPhone at a wedding, recently, it turned into a big deal.

So what happens when Kadyrov's tool for using his Instagram, his iPhone, goes missing? According to Russian human rights group Memorial, Kadyrov misplaced his phone at an opening at the "Shira-Yurt" museum near the village of Germenchuk on Saturday. The museum, a model of a traditional Chechen village, was celebrating a wedding that day.

During the wedding, there was an announcement over loud speakers that Kadyrov had lost his phone, according to Memorial. After the guests went home, the human rights group says that over 1,000 people, including children, were called back to answer questions about the phone. Memorial says that most were only able to return home in the morning.

Kadyrov's office has denied the claims, but Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty say they spoke to a number of local officials who were able to confirm the incident.
 

Someone needs to set Kadryov up with Find my iPhone.

I find the phenomenon of older famous people who are active on social media endlessly intriguing. It's not just the dissonance of older people using newer technology. Do these people need the incremental validation of their own popularity in the form of thousands or millions of followers? Or maybe Kadyrov is just really into photography?

Instagram Direct and the crowded messaging space

Instagram found a place in our hearts as an app for broadcasting moments. Take a photo (or later a video) and share it publicly, and specifically, to people who follow you. Now Instagram wants us to use it for private sharing. Take a photo or video and send it to one person or a small group. Those are entirely distinct species of communication.

Convincing a userbase to break their ingrained behavior pattern and use an app for something completely different is a tough sell. And it’s a lot tougher if that “something different” is actually “something you can do elsewhere”.

If I want to share a photo with a few friends, I can text it, email it, or Facebook message it. These each let me get friends’ reactions and have a conversation around the photo. In fact, they’re all more flexible than Instagram Direct in that I can reply with another photo — the absence of that feature is my biggest gripe about IDG. It also suffers from a creation interface that’s too slow for sharing to such a limited audience. Filtering and adding a witty caption bog down the flow, making Instagram Direct too time intensive to be a rapid-fire visual communication tool.

And of course, if I want to private message someone a photo or video, I can Snapchat them. Snapchat has carved out a purpose and following with ephemerality — something that’s actually different. I can’t send a photo that disappears with any other major messaging service, so I go to Snapchat when I have something silly or racy to share.

So really, the problem is that Instagram Direct is too different from Instagram, and not different enough from everything else.
 

Good piece from Josh Constine on a key problem facing Instagram Direct.

Allowing video to be uploaded was a natural extension for Instagram. Instead of broadcasting photos, you were broadcasting video. It felt comfortable right away. 

Instagram Direct felt immediately strange. I'd never used Instagram as a one-to-one photo sharing tool, and the people I'd chosen to follow on the service were not ones I'd chosen with one-to-one sharing in mind. My Instagram graph is much smaller than my graph on other social graph services because I'd chosen who to follow based on who I wanted to see photo broadcasts from, and I think most people who follow me there were looking for my photo broadcasts as well. It will always be easier for me to share photos one-to-one through another app because my graphs are larger there and because, as Josh notes, the interaction flow is much faster.

I now use the following multitude of apps to message other people on an almost daily basis: email, Twitter, Twitter DM, Facebook, WhatsApp, Line, Snapchat, iMessage, SMS. One would think using so many different messaging apps would be annoying, that the shape of social graphs would see one of these services winning out through network effects.

But now that all of these messaging apps can easily piggyback off of my mobile contact book to easily find the people I already know on those services, the switching costs are very low. The interfaces are all easy to learn and largely equivalent (the other person's message in a chat bubble on one side of the screen, mine on the other side) so the learning curve is also negligible. Finally, since my phone sends me a notification anytime I receive a message through any of these services, I can launch any of the apps with one click and tap out a reply just as easily as I would on the next app.

For those reasons, It's not clear this has to be a winner-take-all space. That makes it challenging for investors in this area. If some other messaging app came along that was somewhat better and some of my friends flocked to it, I could switch in no time, and if for some reason one of these apps became unfashionable, I could delete it without too much regret.

Participation rate and user backlash

As many have pointed out, the reach of Instagram's TOS aren't significantly different than those of services like YouTube and Twitter. But users don't view all social services as equal (and yes, I treat YouTube as a nascent high potential social service, perhaps Google's best chance to build an elite social network). I don't think Twitter users ever worry about their tweets being turned into advertisements, the concept seems extremely unlikely. As for YouTube, from its earliest days the value of having a video hosting service that offers global distribution immediately, for free, seemed worth any amount of advertising.

More importantly, though, I hypothesize one reason the outcry over the modifications to Instagram's TOS have been so much louder is that the ratio of content creation to content consumption on Instagram is higher than for those other services, or for just about any other social network I use. Almost everyone I follow on Instagram seems to post photos from time to time, certainly more than write on Twitter or post videos to YouTube regularly. We need a name for this metric for content sharing social networks:

Number of users who create content / Number of active users on that content network

I'll just call it participation rate for now. My guess is the higher the participation rate on a content social network, the more the users feel like they're creating the bulk of the value on that network. I don't think that's fair to Instagram as they were nearly perfect in creating the purest of social networks, and they do host and distribute a gazillion photos a day. But no matter, that's how users feel, and how they feel determines how they react when the company imposes a value capture mechanism (or in this case, hints at how they'll do it).

What exacerbated the issue was that the new TOS had language that implied that Instagram was going to use your photos to earn money and not provide you with any financial compensation. The users already felt like they'd created a huge percentage of the value in the network, and now it sounded like they'd be exploited to make the company's owners, who had already earned enough money to live out the rest of their days like some of their more well-heeled users, even more money.

[Note that for professional photographers and celebrities on the service, this is actually a serious monetary issue. Naysayers kept mocking regular users for thinking their terrible food and sunset photos would be monetizable in any way, but I follow a bunch of professional photographers and celebrities who make a huge percentage of their living off of monetizing their photographs, and the idea that Instagram could just jump in and take that is absolutely a non-starter. I hope they don't all flee because where else am I going to get my regular fix of pics from the fairy tale life of baddiebey to leave in a constant state of capitalist envy?]

Without knowing what the participation rate is for the leading social networks, it's difficult to test this hypothesis, but one other way to test this would be to look at those who grumbled the most. I suspect they came largely from those who actively post photos instead of just consuming them.

If anyone has any data on this, I'd love to hear it. Namely, it would be fascinating to compare Instagram to two services which I'm guessing have much lower participation rates: Flickr and 500px. Both of those services embrace what I suspect is an audience composed more of a large population of viewers and only partially of contributors (those who upload lots of photos). Both have designed their service with that user distribution in mind, choosing to monetize by targeting only the power users, that sliver of their population that actually upload high-res photos in volume and who value things like higher upload capacity or limits.

It doesn't seem like a strategy Instagram can easily borrow given their viewer/contributor distribution. What fraction of their users could they tax, and for what features? If it's true they have a more evenly distributed base of contributors, i.e. a high participation rate, it may be easier for them to just show ads for all their viewers. That seems the most likely path.