Most of us use Instagram to display our work. It has a great social aspect to it where people can follow your growth and see what you provide as a style. It's where clients go to see if you have what they want with regards to their brand image or way of portraying themselves. It plays an important role in a photographer's working life. As a social platform, they have copied from Snapchat with their stories and now they've copied Pinterest too. Although I don't like copying, let's see what it will offer.Pinterest is used to bookmark images and create collections to divide and save certain concepts and ideas. We are then able to share a specific collection with clients, models, hair and make-up artists, and showcase the vision of the shoot you want to achieve.
But, for the last couple of months, we have been also able to bookmark images that we thought were great on Instagram. We had the ability to keep a collection of images that only we could see by pressing down on the bookmark icon located at the bottom right of the image.
It was only one collection, and I like great landscape images, architectural shots and portraits, so the images got all muddled up into large feed, which wasn't very useful. You weren't able to give your phone to somebody and show these images to explain what you have as an idea like you could with Pinterest. I just used it myself to browse through and get inspiration for my work. Now they've given us the ability to save to separate collections.
Instagram have copied the ability to separate the different collections similar to Pinterest's "boards". It will be released this week if you haven't already got it, and if you long-press the bookmark you'll get the option of saving it to a specific collection.
For me, Pinterest is the go-to place for getting ideas together, but my general daily feed of the latest and greatest images out in the world comes from Instagram. Facebook, the owners of Instagram, is trying to make us use their apps as much as possible, and it'll surely affect Pinterest's use for the same type of function. I imagine I will be using this bookmarking function more and more, and not going to Pinterest when a shoot's post-production process starts.
For now, these collections you make are for you only, but I do believe they'll make it shareable in future. I expect to be able to share a collection containing my ideas and images of my own work mixed with others' I've "pinned" to portray a certain feeling to a client and team through Instagram in the near future.
I am consciously avoiding as much of Mark Zuckerburg's network as I possibly can and I definitely don't want to put any content on his websites if I can avoid it. That said, I have always had an issue with the way Pinterest works. They are in essence taking content off other websites and passing it off on their own site, to which they add revenue generating commercials. It's not a fair model. If Instagram is trying to do something similar it will make their platform even less attractive to me.
You are aware that your broad definition would also exclude every Magazine, Gallery or other sort of aggregator/curation operation which exposes your work to an audience - online and offline.
Not sure of how magazines and other gallery curators work w.r.t. procurement, but based on what I understand from Pinterest's operation is that they take content (images) without consent from the owners of the images and allow their users to make collections of that content. They then serve those collection creators advertising without sharing any of the revenue generated from that aggregated content to the original content creators. It's very wrong in my book.
So Google shouldn't be allowed to collect ad revenue because its not sharing with sites that show up on its search results?
Don't get me started on Google. Especially their image search engine.
But yes, they shouldn't show anything on their pages that doesn't belong to them and collect ad revenues from it, especially images. They are supposed to be a search engine, but somehow over the last 2 decades they have come to believe that they own the internet and can do whatever the hell they want with it.
I blame Google for 99% of the crap websites that exist on the internet today.
How do you expect to be able to find content without search engines and aggregators? This blog would have to shut down too if they can only put out purely original content.
You misunderstand me. Of course we need search indices, which is what we have always had since the beginning of the public internet. But Google went beyond being a search engine. They did some really terrible things to the internet since their emergence, not least of which was the advent of their Adsense and Adwords programs. So many meaningless websites were created for the sole purpose of generating ad revenues that they forgot the original purpose of the internet; to be a resource.
But by far the worst thing that they ever did in the promulgation of their online terror was stick their fingers into the usenet archives (remember Deja News?) and develop a portal that allowed all manner of unspeakable anonymous trolls to infiltrate that archive with complete impunity. They effectively destroyed usenet. Google didn't care who got hurt when the tainted usenet archives they bought were then allowed to be imported into countless web based fora either. No, they encouraged webmasters to do that and then monetise the stolen content they had imported by running Adsense on those posts and indexing them.
Stuff Google. And their version of the internet.
Okay... but to get back on topic, I don't see what's wrong with a search engine, content aggregator, or social network generating revenue from ads. Its providing you a service that you get for free. You click on the image and it takes to you the original content host. Pinterest works the same way Instagram does. Without ads all search engines and social networks would shut down or start charging like $30/month.
Search engines like Google produce no content and neither does Zuckerberg and his social media empire, so what gives them the right to use the content of other people to generate enormous income for themselves? Especially with things like image search. Very seldom do people searching for images to use online actually visit the websites they have been lifted off. It's just wrong in my book.
But honestly, I would rather pay a monthly subscription to an ethical search engine and social network than be held hostage to the greed of these mega corporations. They stink.
Google's old motto 'don't be evil' was a big fail and they certainly do not live up to it. I don't agree with their business practices either, but it's a natural path in order to provide a free service with a business model. If not google, then another player would be leading.
For years Instragm has had bare bones features. Now they finally decided to rip some features from pinterest? awesome. Maybe they could also work on their mobile app to be functional on anything bigger than a phone screen. eg ipad is not retina ready, stuck in vertical mode, website is bare bones.
Wow! Apparently you never ventured deeper into the Usenet groups, or were around when this all was ironed AFAIR in the late 90's with the emergence of Yahoo Groups. Both were huge depositories of stolen aka illegally "shared" content, long before torrents or Napster.
You either learned early, that if you don't want anyone to see or misappropriate your content, don't publish it on the net wilfully. Even then, huge "scanner archives" for Playboy, Penthouse and numerous other publications of the "popular kind" were a major hit and brought 100's of thousands to the net, almost all of which believed that if it was on the net it was free to use or see.
Blaming Google, FB, Pinterest and now Instagram is far too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Only thing left to do if it bothers you, is remove your creations.
Wasn't defending what was going on within usenet (I was there from '97 to the mid 00's) but rather drawing attention to Google's very irresponsible move to bring those archives onto the www where they became searchable by their own engine and used to rip off advertisers and bloat the web with a multitude of rubbish content (that wasn't theirs in the first place).
I have another angle to this story that has affected me personally in a very negative way, but I won't get into that here.
Your "other angle" pun made me smile - this is a photography-focussed website right? If you don't get into it here, where will you get into it? You're part of a community where we are all in the same boat, so if we can learn from one another, not matter how negative, it's beneficial to the industry and everyone who forms part of it. Please share the way it affects you.
It's not really photography related, but it might serve as a warning to other people on how having an online presence can really hurt you if you're not careful.
While I was active on rec.photo.equipment.35mm I got involved in a kind of photography challenge. This was hosted on Pbase and discussed on the newsgroup as there weren't really a lot of online web based forums out there at the time (early 00's). Somebody who was also a member on the group took this very badly. This essentially unhinged person began trolling the participants really badly and began cross-posting all manner of unspeakable lies about those who participated in the challenge. Calling us pedophiles, rapists, you name it.
So what, you might say?
Well, considering that there is exactly one other person in the entire online world with the same name as me and you'll get the picture. So this troll uses my name, via the Google Groups usenet interface to spread all this vicious libel into the usenet archive. Google refuse to do anything about it, saying that they are not responsible for the content on the internet, they just index it. But they actually were responsible for this because the perpetrator was using their web based system to access usenet. And then, to make matters worse, Google put all those usenet archives onto the www and let webmasters import them to their online fora for free.
I first became aware of this when a friend of mine asked me why people were saying I was dishonourably discharged from the army for "molesting little boys". Obviously I was shocked and checked it out only to discover that all this trolls posts to usenet were now all over the www in multiple locations, imported by "webmasters" out to make money off of Google's Adsense program.
I have no way of knowing how much damage this has caused me materially since it happened, other than to say that I gave up applying for jobs in the early part of the century. Google didn't give a damn. They stuck behind their vacuous corporate image and labyrinth of complaint screens, asking me to report abusive content using that system. I did this, but eventually gave up because it keeps on popping up.
A few years ago a British businessman in Hong Kong successfully sued them for the exact same thing and apparently he got a fair payout, but I am down here in little South Africa and I don't have the kind of resources needed to fight Google in court (which one?) over this.
That's why I have zero love for Google.
Thanks for sharing brother from the most beautiful place in the world. At least you know this is a long time ago, and you wouldn't be who you are now hadn't it been for these events. I'm not sure where you are now professionally, but I'm sure you are at a good place, sharing great work with the world and taking part in the photography community. Again, thanks for sharing.