kullin – Page 15 – Media Culpa

How to get a million likes in a day – and a puppy

President Barack Obama promised his daughters a puppy when he was elected in 2008. Another dad required his two daughters to do something themselves in order to get a new puppy. He agreed to get a dog if the girls could get a million likes on Facebook. Impossible, you say? How about doing it in 24 hours? That’s what the girls achieved. And dad kept his promise, the girls and their three brothers are now getting a new dog.

Here’s how it all began. Yesterday, they created a Facebook page called “Twogirlsandapuppy” and posted a message.

“Hi, We’re two sisters and we desperately want a puppy. We have three little brothers, too. Yes, we have five kids in our family.

We lost our dog several months ago to cancer. We really want another one but our parents are reluctant.

Then the other day we saw a brother and sister on facebook post a picture saying that their dad would let them get a dog if they get a ton of likes. We got our dad to agree to it!

He said if we get 1 million likes we get a new puppy. He doesn’t think we can do it.

In our original post we had a link for donations, but that was partly because mom and dad didn’t think anyone other than close friends and family would actually see this page! We removed that link when we saw how many people were coming to this page.

We don’t want to ask strangers for money, only likes.

Thanks for your likes!”

The profile image and a separate image have now almost 2 million likes in about 24 hours. Now, that’s a viral story.

Good luck with the puppy, kids. And parents, don’t make a promise you are not prepared to keep. Getting a million likes might not be that difficult.

Gangnam Style by PSY just reached 1 billion views

Seoul sensation PSY and his viral mega-hit Gangnam Style just reached 1 billion views on Youtube. That is the first time in history that a piece of visual content reaches that many views.

The K-pop video was uploaded on July 15 and quickly reached an international mass audience. It only took 51 days for the video to reach 100 million views, 5 days faster than Justin Bieber’s “Baby”, which took 56 days to reach that many views. “Baby” is currently the second most viewed video on Youtube with 813 million views.

If everyone that viewed the 4 min 13 seconds long video watched it to the end (which of course some didn’t) that would mean that we’ve spent 253 billion seconds on Gangnam Style, or 8,022 years.

If watched in sequence, you would have to start in the year 6010 BC and watch every single minute up til today to rack up the total time the video has been watched.

Pink quits Instagram and leaves 12 million followers

When Instagram announced new Terms of Service two days ago, the community of instagrammers reacted with nothing less than outrage. Among other things, users’ photos could appear in ads and the only way to opt out was to delete your account.

Among the more prominent Instagram users that reacted strongly were National Geographic and artist Pink. National Geographic stopped updating its account and posted this image:

The artist Pink went a step further and has actually deleted her entire account. Before she closed her account, she had more than 12 million followers. Now that’s quite a statement.

The flood of negative reactions forced Instagram to some crisis management and the company yesterday issued a clarification intended to respond to the worst criticism. But the damage is possibly already done. Many are reporting increased and renewed interest in Flickr, which just recently launched a new and updated Instagram-like app.

And Starmatic, a similar app that also lets you import your entire Instagram library, has seen a tremendous increase in import requests during the last 12 hours.

I love Instagram and I hope they will keep their promise to not sell user photos, so I won’t quit the service any time soon. But this could serve as a lesson to any major social network. It is not hard to copy the functionality of a social network, they are rarely unique or patented. I could switch entirely to Starmatic tomorrow if I wanted to. What I don’t want to lose is the network connections, there’s the real value. So when a large enough portion of a network decides to abandon a service, things can move pretty quickly. Hopefully Instagram has learned a lesson.

Instagram users to go private for one day in spam protest

Although Instagram has taken some measures to crack down on the increasing problem with spam, users are starting to become tired with the amount of fake accounts and comments about how to get more followers. In a response to the lack of action from Instagram, the community of instagrammers have decided to announce Dec 4 as the day many will turn their profiles to private. This protest is intended to send a message to Instagram that users are fed up with the situation, they just want to be able to share images without having to be approached by spammers.

Under the hashtag #onedaywithoutspam you can see protest images like these:

“Observing a day of protest against all the #spam on Dec. 4 by posting this and setting my profile to Private for 24 hours on that day. Please join in and hopefully #instagram will begin to take more serious steps to address this annoyance that is out of control.”

Whether this will have any effect on the spam problem remains to be seen.

5 years on Twitter – infographic

Apparently I joined Twitter five years ago today, on Nov 14, 2007. It’s been a fascinating development and back then I couldn’t envision how important Twitter would grow and how many followers I could gain in these years. In fact, 8 months earlier, in March 2007, I mentioned Twitter for the first time on this blog and my first impressions were all but positive. Here is my first comment about Twitter:

“I’m clearly totally out of fashion when I say that I have no desire to try out the new mega hype Twitter.”

At least, I have no problem admitting I was wrong. Today, Twitter is one of my most important news sources and tools for building relationships online. That said, here is a short infographic of my first five years on Twitter, courtesy of Visual.ly and Amstel Beer (!). Click on the image for a larger version.

Footnote: The detailed data for the infographic probably is only for the last 12 monts, so there is a possibility that other tweets and dates have generated more engagement. I am @kullin on Twitter, by the way.