If you had never heard of, let alone used, the Instagram app, it popped up on your radar screen recently when Facebook acquired it for $1 billion, the largest acquisition the social-media giant has ever completed. Maybe it was to eliminate a photo-sharing competitor but perhaps exclusive features of Instagram made the deal so sweet.

Chris Tacket, writing on technology for TheAtlantic.com, posted a transcript of an interview with Instagram founder Kevin Systrom. Tacket’s article can be found at “Will Post-Facebook Instagram Deliver on Its Founder’s Dream?”; the original interview was conducted by Digg founder Kevin Rose.

Tacket’s take on what Instagram has that Flickr and Twitter don’t, and what Facebook really wanted, was the ability to filter images by location data and timestamps:

“I imagine using Instagram to look up a restaurant I’m going to visit to see what food photos have been shared from that location in the past few days. Maybe I’ll be tempted to order something different because it looks so good. Rather than relying on what the official handlers of these locations’ social media accounts want to share, I’d be able to tune in to the users’ experience of them — to see the most recent visual media from those locations at this very moment, as shared by people who are motivated by little else save the act of sharing itself.”

Let’s hope that Facebook leaves this piece of Instagram intact.

Laura Abrahamsen, April 25, 2012

With the convenience and conciseness of Twitter, e-mail may become the snail-mail of the Web 2.0 world, so suggests Steve Cooper, a blogger for Forbes.com, in his recent post “6 Reasons Twitter is Becoming My New E-Mail.”

While e-mail still has a place in modern communications, Cooper believes it is best reserved for the follow-ups, the deeper conversations that may precede or replace a phone call or face to face meeting. Twitter is his go-to medium for initial contact:

“One of my first breakthroughs on Twitter came after I sent several e-mails to a person to engage in partnership talks. I never got a reply. Within the first week I joined Twitter, this same person began following me and we finally connected. Over the years, I have found this wasn’t an aberration, but a new normal.”

Cooper also likes Twitter’s natural fit for mobile communications, whether you receive Tweets as texts or through your smartphone. Twitter also carries a sense of urgency to respond, something that traditional e-mail is beginning to lose:

Unlike e-mail, where you can step away for two hours (or two weeks) and it will still be there; the conversations on Twitter will have come and gone. Twitter is most effective when you get people while they’re listening.

So much of our media is now engaged on our schedules, rather than its creators’; Twitter brings the message and messenger into real time.

Laura Abrahamsen, April 18, 2012