About srinistuff

December 21, 2012

What's 'Really' up with Instagram?



Instagram will sell your photos without your permission?
Instagram will share your data with Facebook?
With so much news doing rounds on various tech blogs, news sites in the last couple of days, a quick overview and recap of what’s going on and really find out what the confusion is all about and hopefully clear it out for all of you.
So here’s what exactly happened and is happening with Instagram?
Why the outrage against Instagram by users?
On 18th December Instagram updated its blog with its Privacy and Terms of Service Changes on Instagram. As it is known, no one ever reads the Terms and Conditions down to the tee, but obvious. This was again evident a few weeks ago when a really inane chain of Facebook posts was doing rounds on Facebook about Privacy, which really meant nothing as Facebook Privacy changes that had been released were really about the voting issues and certain semantics that people didn’t care to read. People started to abuse, outrage, curse and a lot more… on twitter, on Facebook, basically everywhere else they could. Tools popped up which helped you to back up your Instagram photos and delete your account. Some articles showcasing how some went back to Flickr, cause of this ‘supposed’ move by Instagram.
Here are some quotes that may have been ‘misinterpreted’:
“We may share User Content and your information (including but not limited to, information from cookies, log files, device identifiers, location data, and usage data) with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Instagram is part of, or that become part of that group (“Affiliates”). Affiliates may use this information to help provide, understand, and improve the Service (including by providing analytics) and Affiliates’ own services (including by providing you with better and more relevant experiences). But these Affiliates will honor the choices you make about who can see your photos.”
“Instagram, its Affiliates, or Service Providers may transfer information that we collect about you, including personal information across borders and from your country or jurisdiction to other countries or jurisdictions around the world.”
Due to which, there were many blogs, general news sites that put up ‘tangy’ and ‘sensational’ news stating ‘Instagram now has right to sell your photos (Ownership changes)
What do you expect then? Outrage was evident, but of course…
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Srinivas has been a communications professional for over 10 years, and has been blogging since 2005. He has worked with the likes of Social Wavelength, now Mirum India, (A JWT Group Company) for four years and now Heads Learning and Development & Analytics at Social Kinnect: A Digital Marketing Agency in Mumbai. His passion for Advertising, Creativity, Social & Digital Marketing helps make a difference for the brands they work with. 

Communities Launched on Google+



Yes, we’ve been wondering about this for a while now… With so many options and alternatives around, why and when would Google+ introduce communities? Recently one of my colleagues told me, that it’s here… And immediately he created a few groups and invited me to a couple of them.  I personally am not an avid user of Google+ as of now. Have explored it in the past and was there even before it launched to everyone. (Read: beta invites) But most of my time goes in tinkering around Facebook, Twitter and most recently, Quora. Yes, I shall of course write another post that’ll detail my passion and love for Quora, but for now, I’m pretty happy that communities on Google+ have been introduced.
We all know, Google+ as a whole has a good level of traction from ‘The Geek’ community. Having said that, introduction of Google+ community is quite a blessing! Of course there are a lot of pros and cons about communities existing generally, but having said that one’s handling technology based websites, technology in general or for that matter niche groups and in fact product companies like SocioFi themselves… will appreciate the existence on Google+ for such a feature.
While Google+ says this
“Today Google+ is the fastest-growing network thingy ever. More than 500 million people have upgraded, 235 million are active across Google (+1′ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search…), and 135 million are active in just the stream.”
I’d tend to say it’s a little different from what it looks like… One has to but agree that a lot of traction in terms of numbers is from Gmail as well. Also number of users vs. number of active users is a question one must answer. However, with the introduction of the Communities, aspect, the ballgame is a little different now, especially with Google+ having a Hangout feature, which can be explored well on the community front.

Read the rest of the article here

Srinivas has been a communications professional for over 10 years, and has been blogging since 2005. He has worked with the likes of Social Wavelength, now Mirum India, (A JWT Group Company) for four years and now Heads Learning and Development & Analytics at Social Kinnect: A Digital Marketing Agency in Mumbai. His passion for Advertising, Creativity, Social & Digital Marketing helps make a difference for the brands they work with. 

December 06, 2012

What are Facebook global pages? How does one set it up?



Answer to a question I asked on Quora while doing some research for Facebook Global Pages! I intend to write a blog about my findings later on. But thanks to Jack Lindamood, Software engineer at Facebook who worked on Global Pages at Facebook. Thanks Jack for the detailed answer. It was very helpful!

Read Quote of Jack Lindamood's answer to Facebook: What are Facebook global pages? How does one set it up? on Quora