Norwegian paper offers online version without info from mass murder trial

The trial against the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik started today and the media coverage, especially in Norway, is massive. The online news sites are filled with interviews, articles, photos and video coverage. The events that took place on July 22 this year in Oslo and Utøya were nothing short of horrific. For many people in Norway, there may of course be a number of reasons why you would not want to read the detailed reports from the trial, including photos and videos of the murderer. Dagbladet.no solved that issue by offering a “trial free” button, i. e. a version of the site that is stripped from any articles of the murder trial. By clicking the button “front page without the July 22 event” you get a completely different front page.

Here are the screen shots of the regular site and the special version.

Cinemagram – an Instagram for animated images

Popular photo app Instagram does many things really well, but one thing it does not handle is the ability to upload and share videos. Enter Cinemagram, a social networking app for sharing short videos that are actually made into animated GIFs. It includes Instagram-like features such as the ability to add filters to your videos, but the twist with Cinemagram is that each video can be edited so that only a portion of the frame is animated and the rest is in form of a still shot. The effects can be hilarious.

The app is fairly new and was initially $1.99 in Appstore, but it is currently free. It is too soon to tell if this app will become successful, but one thing I noticed immediately is that creative uploads have the possibility to get a lot of attention. I had only just downloaded the app and had almost no followers, still my third video has got almost 500 likes during the first 24 hours since upload. You can see it below. The quality is quite poor but it looks a lot better on the iPhone.

60 m

Created with cinemagr.am

One of the reasons that content may “go viral” within the app is that each time you “like” a video, it is re-posted by you in the app, sort of like a retweet on Twitter, so the content gets a lot of exposure. On top of that the videos with the most likes are displayed in one of the tabs in the app.

Cinemagram doesn’t have a very good web presence, but if you manage to find your profile page and/or the page of one of your animated images, you can find the embed code so that you can paste it easily to your blog for example. The page for the image above is: http://cinemagr.am/showSingle/3502979 and my “profile page” is here: http://cinemagr.am/web/user/827705

Check out and download Cinemagram here.

Fake IKEA gift cards – Spam hits Pinterest

The popular online pinboard Pinterest has been hit by a series of spam ads. Pinterest user Craig Fifield found that a strange image had been posted on of of his wife’s boards. It was something she would never pin on the site, an ad for Wal-Mart. The same thing was noticed by Om Malik on Gigaom:

“Earlier this evening, some kind of spam-exploit injected javascript code that started replacing many Pinterest photos with ads for Best Buy. (see photo.) The actions resulted in disgruntled users blaming Pinterest.”

Fake gift cards for well known brands such as Wal-Mart, IKEA, iPad and others are suddenly all over Pinterest.

They all seem to be pointing to the site facebook-goodies.com and some spammer has probably posted several photos and then after they were repinned, the image changed to an ad through some kind of script. The original images seem to have been posted to boards themed “party ideas”, “beauty” and “quotes” to name a few.

Some of the spam ads have been repinned more than 6,000 times.

This is of course quite serious for Pinterest, since it is a blow to the very heart of the site. If we can no longer trust that images we repin aren’t going to turn into spam ads, dare we use the site at all?

Another form of spam that has been emerging is that the same image is posted multiple times on multiple accounts, but with the exact same text.

Update: one of the accounts that seemed to be the origin of some spam ads have now been deleted: http://pinterest.com/ElisabethCarla/

Infographic: H&M vs Spotify on Twitter

H&M is the Swedish brand with most followers on Twitter. But Spotify, which is the second largest brand, creates more engagement around each tweet.

Here is an infographic that illustrates the battle for the top spot among Swedish brands on Twitter. Created with visual.ly.

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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

Update: the links to Statigram no longer work

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/

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.

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.