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.

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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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.

The first tweet was on Jan 15th.

Tonight we’ll see who rules this city, like this if you support us.

— Zlatan Ibrahimović (@Ibra_official) januari 15, 2012

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.

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.

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:

Strategies for choosing Twitter handle – Jan 2009
Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter – June 2009
GM’s Facebook page attacked by angry Saab fans – Dec 2011
Top 20 countries on Twitter – Jan 2010
BP Oil Spill and Social Media – May 2010

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

Photo from Flickr.

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.

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.

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.

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.