Instagram set for more changes

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Facial recognition, landmark detection, and even audio cues picked up through your phone’s microphone could let Instagram Video intelligently suggest a cover frame for mini-movies or even tag them, according to recent Facebook patents.

We all know how quickly Insta users like myself have adapted to posting 15 second video's to Instagram so it will be interesting to see how these potential new updates take hold.

The story of the potential upgrades comes to us via TechCrunch writer Josh Constine who has written two articles (HERE & HERE) on the Facebook patent requests.  The requests for these patents were filed in October 2011 and were granted in April 2013.

Essentially, they describe technology for looking at each frame of a video as if it were a photo. Detection algorithms can then be used to identify people, written words, brands, and landmarks through facial and pattern recognition.This could let Facebook suggest formal tags of people, places, and brands in a video, or just quietly log that information as metadata to be used for determining who to surface the video to in the news feed. For example, the video could be shown more prominently to people nearby, who Like those landmarks or brands, or who are friends of those who appear in the video. Though Instagram uses an unfiltered feed, it recently added a tagging system that could take advantage of this kind of detection.

Read Josh's articles for more on these developments

Photo montages

Like many people I use my iPhone as a camera & like many, my photo's get shared on instagram.  As an Instagram user i've noticed people posting montages or collages of photos and recently downloaded an app to do this as well.

Feel free to follow me on instagram (@nzompilot)

I thought I'd share some of the fun I've had recently

©nzompilot - a collection of some recent beer's I've tasted

©nzompilot -  lighting showcase at an event I recently did tech for

©nzompilot - some of my favourite autumn sunrise shots taken over the last few weeks

©nzompilot - tonight is the Roar's toughest finals challenge so here are some pregame.after game shots

©nzompilot - an every day occurance for me Brisbane trains

Twitter launch rival to Instagram

So as mentioned in a blog post last week (When social media networks fight) Instrgram and Twitter have had a falling out which has resulted in Instagram photos shared on twitter now occuring as web links that direct users to Instagram's own websites.

Well Twitter have countered this with the launch of their own photo filtering software which was released in an update now available in the App Store. Below is a screen shot of this new software powered by Aviary.

So the battle has begun between the rival networks for the all important market share that is the "hipster' generation.

In writing this piece I have looked at the offering from Twitter which seems to be a solid market entry, there are 9 choices of filter (including no filter) and the auto enhance wizard is as easy as a touch of a button, the grid view layout of the filters is great, but to really get the full impression of what your pic would look like with the filter in place the easiest way is to swipe through the full screen view.

I will be interested to see how this new offering from twitter is taken up by users however I still see Instagram having a large share of the market, as their offering is established and they currently offer a larger number of filter offerings.

When social media networks fight

We the users seem to be the losers in the latest 'social media war' between three of the heavy weights of the social media revolution.\

Instagram who was recently purchased by Facebook have announced that they no longer support twitter cards which allowed Twitter users to view Instagram photos in the tweet.  Users are now required to click the link and view the photo on an Instagram website.

The move escalates a rivalry in the fast-growing social networking sector, where the biggest players have sought to wall off access to content from rival services and to their ranks of users.
"They're both competing for slices of the same pie, the pie being users' attention," said Ray Valdes, an analyst with research firm Gartner.   

I for one think this is a petty squabble, but I really dont expect much better from these companies who are more interested in their market share and profits than the experience of their users.

Read more about the blocking of Instagram content and the growing rift between the big social media companies in this Reuters article via stuff.co.nz