Tag : community

I didn't?

Okay. Well, it's safe to say I am obsessed with this app and its precious, awesome community. In next to no time, all my base are belong to Instagram. It has stealthily taken apart and re-made my online life in the course of a few weeks. And it's mobile: it's an on-the-go service, not something I have to sit down and use at a desktop - so I AM talking about my *whole* life, much to the chagrin of my wife and child :)

This weekend Instagram passed 3 million users. This is massive because we're talking about 3 million iPhone users only (you can't currently add photos any other way), and in recognition of the total hotness, co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were interviewed by TechCrunch about their plans and what they think Instagram means.

Hint: it's not a mobile photo-sharing service 

Remember when the Web was new and every brand had to have a 'home page'?

Back then - in the 90s - the term was used inter-changeably with 'website'. No-one knew what they were actually for, but everyone had to have one. Every brand, even breakfast cereals, shoe polish, toothpaste and cat food, had to have one. Even the most boring brands had to have them. They eventually became known as microsites. No-one knew why they existed or what they did, but everyone assumed that it was massively important to have one and if you didn't you'd be missing out on a potential global audience of billions.

Quora and Instagram have both been rocking my world over the past few weeks, for very different reasons. Both provide incredibly intense community experiences. Both use other services to some extent parasitically. Both should - arguably - have been built by existing services (Twitter should have built Quora; Flickr should have built Instagram). Both are much discussed and debated, and growing rapidly.

But that's where the similarity ends.

Today, London saw its first snowfall of this winter season. As the white powder from the sky changed into sizable, more distinct flakes of snow, everyone in our office got excited and many (including me) moved to the windows for a few minutes to witness it. Now, on one level, it isn’t anything special, but on another much more wide-ranging level, there’s something about Nature’s magic that draws everyone to it – that makes people go ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’.

We’ve made a new release of ProtectTheHuman.com, the social media campaigning platform and activism community we launched for Amnesty UK in August 2008.

On the last day of the SxSW Interactive festival a couple of young female zombies shuffled over to us. They’d been ‘turned’ that very morning and were handing out ‘infected’ stickers and leaflets to get people involved in the world’s first community generated zombie film, Lost Zombies.