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Facebook Makes Moves On Instagram's Users (bloomberg.com)
Facebook is trying to get Instagram users to visit its site more often by further entwining the two services. According to Instagram user Spencer Chen, the Instagram app prompted him to check out a friend's new photo on Facebook. "Chen grabbed a screenshot and posted the notification on the internet, calling it a cry for attention by the older social network," reports Bloomberg. From the report: Instagram says what Chen experienced was a product test with a small contingent of users. Still, Instagram feeds Facebook in other ways. Last year, Facebook launched its own version of an Instagram tool called Stories, which lets people post videos that disappear within 24 hours. (The feature was initially copied from Snap Inc., a competitor.) Greenfield noticed the Facebook version became more popular once it became possible for Instagram users to post their stories in both places with the click of a button. Instagram Stories' 400 million users present a significant opportunity for Facebook's advertising business, according to Ken Sena, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities. Instagram is on track to provide Facebook with $20 billion in revenue by 2020, about a quarter of Facebook's total, he wrote to investors. And cross-posting could help Facebook's video ambitions.
How much more intrinsically awful do they have to be to make people go elsewhere?
I created a Facebook account a month or so ago in order to advertise a found stray cat. I adjusted my settings at least a half a dozen times to try and stem the flood of emails and notifications. Come see what the lost and found pet group is doing. We bet you know this person, friend them. Look at this photo, tag yourself in it. On and on and on. The longer you don't log in, the more desperate they get. Every time I get my settings changed to preclude that type of contact, something "new" shows up for the first time.
In a way you have to admire the creativity of their programmers to find ways to justify contacting you, to find ways to just get you to drink the kool-aid. It was with some great relief that I actually found the cat's owners and could get myself back off Facebook.
I tried to come up with some redeeming aspect of Facebook during my stint there. In the end, it was an ad on Kijiji that located the cat's owners, so there wasn't even that in Facebook's favour. I honestly tried, but I can't think of anything good to come out of the platform that isn't available more safely and less invsasively somewhere else.