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Instagram has changed the way it gives ID numbers to photos

In January I published a blog post about the growth of Instagram. I hade noticed that the unique ID numbers for photos on Instagram were handed out in a serial sequence. In other words, it wasn’t very hard to calculate the growth of the service since the data was publicly available. All you had to do was a bit of digging. For example, here is photo number 400 million: http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/detail/400000000_3849764

A few weeks later, on Feb 7 to be precise, Instagram changed the ID numbers from serial sequence to what looks like a random set of numbers. As of this date, the ID numbers are determined with what I believe is called a hash function (please correct me if I got this wrong). It is no longer possible to determine the volume of uploads to Instagram by simply looking at the ID numbers.

So how do I know this changed on Feb 7? Take a look at the Instagram user “boobievsjagger“. On that day, he posted this photo:

http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/detail/686008000_10844406

According to the first part of the unique ID, this is photo number 686,008,000. The second part of that string is the ID for that user.

Later that day he published another photo:

http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/detail/120983929741434582_10844406

The first part of the ID is now replaced with 18 digits that gives us no clue to what number among the uploads this photo has. The same goes for all other images posted after Feb 7.

I predicted in my January post that Instagram would reach 1 billion uploaded photos by April this year. If you ask me, I think Instagram changed the way each photo is identified after my blog post, which was also picked up by The Next Web, among others. So now we can’t tell how fast Instagram is growing, until the company decides to tell us themselves. Let’s wait and see.

A related question is if the ID numbers for members on Instagram also will change. As it looks now, you can tell that Instagram has at least 27 million users. Here is a friend of mine that just joined: http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/user/27135093/

Posted in Statistics.

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By kullin – March 11, 2012

Barack Obama’s profile on Pinterest hijacked again

After a bit of confusion this week, I finally understood what had happened to Barack Obama’s profile page on Pinterest. It seemed as if the account had pinned several “non-presidential” images to a board, but in reality a user had taken advantage of a security flaw in Pinterest. When you invite another user to collaborate on a board, that board becomes visible on that user’s profile too. So an inactive account like Obama’s could be “hijacked” to include any board without the account owner even noticing it.

After that first incident, the person who managed the board that appeared on Obama’s page, removed it. But now it has happened again. Another board is visible on pinterest.com/barackobama and once again it does not belong to that account.

barack-obama-pinterest

Having the President look like a fool on your site, can’t be good for business. Pinterest should change the procedure so that a user that has been invited to collaborate on a board actively has to agree that the board becomes visible on its profile.

Posted in Crisis, PR.

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By kullin – March 4, 2012

Barack Obama brandjacked on Pinterest – updated

[Updated - see end of the post] Yesterday Mashable noted that Barack Obama had joined yet another social network, namely the much hyped Pinterest. At that point, the account had no boards. I must admit that I thought that it was an official account for the Obama/Biden campaign. I couldn’t for the life of me think that the campaign people and/or Pinterest would allow someone to snatch the username “barackobama” from the US President. But it seems both Mashable and I were wrong.

The Pinterest account has now posted one board, but it does not at all look like the kind of content you thought would be pinned by Obama. In fact, when you hold the cursor over the board you will notice that the link points to a board by another user: http://pinterest.com/mikestreet/bropin/ This board has some 440 pins, including some images that are NSFW.

Pin It

Barack Obama Pinterest

I don’t know how this is done technically. When I look at my own Pinterest profile I only see boards that are my own. But “mikestreet” has the very same board with the same images on his profile, so clearly this must be a fake Obama account. What do you think? Could there be another explanation?

Update: I emailed with Lauren Orsini who gave a reasonable explanation to what happened. The account is probably not fake at all, but the board seen above in my screen shot was put there as a joke by Mike Street. You see, there is a way to add other Pinterest users as collaborators to your boards and when you do, that board will appear on their profile too. This can be used with great effect if you are doing it to an inactive account, like a celebrity for example, they will not notice they have been added. So the Obama account was not paying attention that Mike added it as collaborator, making us believe that Obama had created a board named #BroPin. Lauren has written about that security flaw here – How to hijack popular brands on Pinterest for free publicity.

Although I don’t recommend that you do this on Pinterest, I must admit I was fooled. Well played!

Posted in Crisis, PR.

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By kullin – March 1, 2012

Lawyers use Facebook to serve court claim

People move, but their Facebook profiles stay the same. So if you are a lawyer that need to serve a court claim to an individual, Facebook may just be a good alternative to sending a letter. A lawyer at the law firm Stephenson Harwood has convinced the High Court in the UK to let him serve a court claim via Facebook to an individual that they could not locate the postal address of.

Jenni Jenkins, an associate at the law firm Memery Crystal, commented:

“The courts recognise the increasing power of social networking sites like Facebook. It’s all very well serving proceedings at a last known residential address, but people move house all the time. Your email or Facebook account moves with you.

“If a claimant can identify the defendant from their photo and establish that the Facebook account is active, this is a perfectly sensible way of serving a claim and giving the defendant an opportunity to respond.”

There are two key elements that make this practice possible. First, that you are able to convince the court that you have found the right Facebook profile and that it is active. Second, that this person lets anyone send him or her messages on Facebook (this is something that you manage in your security settings on Facebook).

Facebook is really becoming the number one means of connecting people with each other.

Posted in Case Studies.

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By kullin – February 22, 2012

Zlatan Ibrahimovic is finally on Twitter

International top media outlets like Gazetta dello Sport, Sky Italia, AP and Al Jazeera have been fooled by people pretending to be Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter. Even his own club AC Milan has been fooled by a Twitter impersonator. His agent Mino Raiola told Sky Sports back in October 2010 that Ibra is not on Twitter. But finally it seems that the Swedish striker has launched an official Twitter account at @Ibra_official. In a post on Facebook on Feb 14 he states that we now can follow him on Twitter as well.

zlatan-ibrahimovic-twitter

The first tweet was on Jan 15th.

Tweets are automatically posted via the official Facebook page, which currently has 2.5 million fans. How can we be sure this time it is the official account? Well, it has been confirmed by the Danish PR agency The Perfect Brands that they represent Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The agency is posting the updates so Ibra himself is not tweeting. Not yet, at least.

Via Ajour.

Posted in Twitter.

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By kullin – February 21, 2012

Infographic of 10,000 tweets

Not only have I been blogging for 8 years today. I reached another milestone just now. Since November 2007 I have tweeted 10,000 times and to celebrate this occasion I have produced this little infographic of my Twitter history. It was partially created with the service visual.ly, but about half of the content has been included manually by me.

Happy 10,000 tweets to me! You can find me on Twitter as @kullin.

infographic-kullin-10000-tweets

Posted in Statistics, Twitter.

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By kullin – February 17, 2012

8 year blog anniversary

Today, I have been blogging for eight years. That’s an incredibly long time and I have published more than 1,500 posts here on Media Culpa, or almost 200 blog posts per year. The first posts were nothing more than short notes, but the posts soon developed more inte longer articles.

∞

To celebrate the occasion, I thought that I would share some small details about the past year for this blog.

  • 80% of my visitors are from outside of Sweden (up from 72% previous 12 months). During the last year, the blog has gotten visitors from 174 different countries/territories (up from 162), including Greenland, Kiribati and Turkmenistan. Sweden is no longer the top country, instead USA is first (26%), followed by Sweden (20%) and UK (7.8%).
  • 56% of all visits came from search engines, up from 50% previous 12 month period.
  • Top referring search key words: “zlatan ibrahimovic twitter” and “twitter handle”. Top word previous year was “twitter handle”.
  • Top referral sources: 1) Twitter, 2) Facebook
  • Busiest day, Dec 21, 2011
  • Media attention worth mentioning are for example that I was on the front page of Swedish Internetworld and that The Next Web picked up my piece about Instagram growing faster than Flickr.

It is interesting that only one of the top five posts (most visits) has actually been published during the period. All the other four are older posts that still attract a lot of visitors:

If you want to follow my blog, don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or “like” it on Facebook.

Photo from Flickr.

Posted in Blogging, Statistics, Twitter.

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By kullin – February 17, 2012

Whitney Houston is dead – Twitter user beats media with the scoop

So I wake up to hear the tragic news that the fantastic singer Whitney Houston is dead. As often happens these days, I found out via social media, this time via comments on Facebook. When the story broke, the news spread on Twitter at the speed of over 1,000 tweets per second. The first hour there were almost 2.5 million tweets about her death, according to Topsy.com.

And once again we find an example of how Twitter beat traditional media with the scoop. Twitter user @chilemasgrande tweeted this 27 minutes before the first news outlet tweeted.

whitney-houston-death-twitter

Here is the first confirmed tweet from AP about the death of Whitney Houston, a tweet that has been retweeted more than 11,000 times.

whitney-houston-death-AP-tweet

But Twitter and Facebook are not the only social media channels that become outlets for grieving fans. On Instagram, there are thousands of images posted with the tag #whitneyhouston and hundreds more are being added as I post this.

whitney-houston-instagram

And on Pinterest, photos of Houston are being commented, pinned and repinned. This photo has currently been repinned 900 times and has more than 100 comments.

Source: google.com via Marenda on Pinterest

 

Social media is becoming the place where we both discover news and share our thoughts. This story is just one more example of that.

Posted in Media & Journalism, Twitter.

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By kullin – February 12, 2012

Facebook is driving more traffic to Pinterest than to Instagram

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the new social media darling Pinterest. The online pinboard is growing quickly and according to a new report from Compete, Pinterest is also driving a lot of traffic to other social networks. People are sharing images and videos on Pinterest which in turn drive traffic to sites like Facebook. According to the State of Social Media report from Compete, Pinterest delivered 1.7 million visits to Facebook in November 2011, an increase by 62%. As a comparison, that is almost double the amount of referrals from an established site like Yellowpages.com.

In this social ecosystem, social networks in turn drive traffic back to Pinterest. It is quite interesting to see that Facebook is already driving more traffic to Pinterest than to Instagram (0.16% share vs 0.06%). And this was before it was announced in January that Pinterest was among the sites that could start auto-update to the Facebook timeline, which possibly means that more images are now shared on Facebook than in November.

visits-from-facebook

Twitter on the other hand is still driving more referrals to Instagram than to Pinterest.

visits-from-twitter

The difference between how Facebook and Twitter drive referrals to Pinterest and Instagram is interesting. I don’t have an explanation to why this is, but one theory could be that the demographics of Pinterest users better match Facebook users while Instagram users are more like Twitter users. Says TechCrunch:

“Unlike most web startups, Pinterest’s core user base is not the typical early adopter set from the west and east coasts of the United States. While the Pacific and North East regions contained the most Pinterest users in May, now its strongholds are in the East South Central and West North Central States, such as Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Mississippi.”

According to TechCrunch, a large portion of Pinterest users in the US are 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland which may explain why some of the more popular categories on Pinterest are food, pets, hair & beauty and travel.

Another explanation can of course be that Instagram mainly is an app and that its web presence is not very good. When you click on an Instagram photo there’s hardly no way to get that user to keep on browsing on the site. You can’t even click on my name and explore more of my photos, so visits to www.instagr.am is not at all encouraged. On Twitter, Instagram photos are viewable within the site and in for example TweetDeck (but I don’t know if that counts as a “visit”).

Also, a tiny but important detail. When you tweet a photo from Pinterest, it doesn’t include the caption in the tweet, which might reduce the willingness to push the send button. Fix that, and I am sure more people will share pinned images on Twitter.

Note: Swedish readers may want to read this story about how Pinterest is driving millions of visits to a blogger.

Posted in Statistics, Twitter.

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By kullin – February 10, 2012

The Telegraph can see into the future

What type of journalism could be more up to date than live broadcast or real time reporting? The UK paper the Telegraph may have come up with a solution – publishing articles from the future. Today, Feb 5, 2012, the Telegraph has published an article from March 4, 2012. I knew the Brits were smart, but to see one month into the future was even more than I expected.

Of course, there could be another explanation. That the Education Editor dropped out of math in school… ;)

telegraph-blooper

 

Posted in Media & Journalism.

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By kullin – February 5, 2012

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