Facebook and Instagram both have “Stories”. Stories are temporary vertical pictures and video that are only available for a limited amount of time before they are backed up and saved for retrieval once you request your data.
In theory, they are a fantastic way of sharing life as it happens without worrying about something embarrassing being available for an extended period of time. In practise, they are a way for Facebook and Instagram to force users to be active every day if they do not want to miss out on what their friends are sharing.
I never use Stories because I’m over 30 so I’m less of an early adopter than I used to be. ;-). On a more serious note, I don’t use Stories because it encourages people to produce kitsch rather than the content of value. It also forces you to look at an image or video just once for a few seconds. The only way to pause this content is to touch the screen to see content long enough.
Content, in Stories, is so fleeting that if you blink you’ll miss it. It’s also a way for FB to force you to be attentive. With ordinary FB timelines you can stay on content until you scroll past it. This means that you can have a conversation or do something else at the same time. It also means that it’s easier to skip adverts. With Stories they know that you have seen the advert.
Some content and images shared via Stories are worth more than 3-5 seconds. They’re worth an interaction. In Stories the only interaction is a direct message. In Stories the only way to save content you like is to either screen record or screengrab.
Another drawback is that we’ve gone from having one timeline with friend activities to two. We now have to spend time scrolling down one stream, and when that’s done we theoretically have to scroll across.
People who use Stories, rather than the primary timeline become invisible. Their content is so well hidden that I miss it. Their content is so well hidden that they might as well start a blog.
When I finished writing I couldn’t think of a conclusion. The conclusion is that ordinary people social media is a lonely and invisible place. We write thoughts, share pictures and then within seconds they’re far down in a timeline never to be seen. In light of this making them fleeting, as they are in Stories only makes our content that much easier to ignore. By writing a blog post it may go unseen for years, but it’s there, and if someone decides to read every post, as I have sometimes done, then a blog is a good time capsule, a good way of keeping people entertained. Blogs, after all, do get published as books, sometimes.
A few weeks ago I was in Paris and when someone pulled out the iphone I commented that it’s a bureaucratic tool but wasn’t sure why. The n95 is a flexible fun phone to play with especially when looking at Sportstracker. It’s an application I use every time I walk around. I’m not alone. Over a million people downloaded the application.
Eventually more than 1 million people downloaded the program and used it for sports the developers never dreamed of, such as paragliding, hot-air ballooning, and motorcycle riding.
As a result, Nokia developers are realizing that aiming the application at amateur athletes was too narrow. They are thinking of rebranding the application as a kind of life-tracker. Based on the response to the software on Beta Labs, that may well help drive users to Nokia’s Ovi Web portal [also in beta testing], which is the basis of Nokia’s attempt to carve out a big piece of the evolving, mobile Internet. “It shows people they can do much more [with their handsets] than just make phone calls,” says researcher Kaasinen.
If i start a trip from work or home there’s a good chance I won’t let sportstracker report where I am live because I don’t want people to know certain details of my life. When I’m on holiday however this is a different matter. If I’m walking in St Moritz and I want my twitter or social media friends to see where I am then the sports tracker tells them where I am. With Flixwagon, Qik or Bambuser they can watch video of what I’m seeing as I’m seeing it.
That’s because you bring your friends with you with these new technologies. The digital lifestyle is more inmportant in how we relate to people and whilst in a place like Switzerland it may help to isolate people in high adoption areas of such technologies it has the reverse effect. Look at the Social media scene in London as just one example. It’s just a matter of time before other manufacturers catch up and these toys become mainstream.
The social media living room is great because it’s really any device that you can connect to the web with, whether a simple mobile phone or a full spec desktop computer.
Some of us look at the computer first thing in the morning and last thing at a night. This is as much as part of a technological expansion in the form of broadband.
Just today an article by the BBC described how people are more and more wired with 90% using broadband, or some similar number. What this means is simple
More hours spent therefore more conversation. With twitter it’s more overheard conversations. That’s not where it stops.
Twitter, seesmic and similar websites turn a private discussion into a public one where the “overheard conversation” is a key point. It’s an evolution back to the route of internet chat. 10 years ago I spent 13hrs in a row online and I saw the shift from Australia to Japan, India, South Africa, Eastern Europe, Europe, NEw York and more.
The difference is that at that time there was no meta data and the initiator to conversations was ASL. Now it’s reached maturity for those of us early adopters. Many of our friends are middle adopters and when they start using it they will not take full advantage.
Look at how people use facebook. When asked by @leisa on twitter during a meeting in real life how often I checked facebook I answered as much as my e-mail. A lot of people do.
What is not talked about is how middle adopters use it. They are far more limited. They don’t add rss feeds because they have no blog, few pictures if any on flickr and in general do not create content. They’re lurkers. Almost all of my friends are facebook I’ve been to parties with, studied or a combination of more. As a result it’s a personal network of IRL friends who have links to each other as well as through me.
These people don’t use twitter, jaiku, tumblr, Pulse plaxo or more. I surprised a conversation on facebook where after seeing someone comment on their post one facebook user asked the other how dare they comment. They didn’t understand the principle of the forum. That’s something all of us are familiar with as early adopters. We are not technological determinists. We believe in the need for something and create a technology to cope.
Look at Seesmic. It’s video. It’s twitter with video. One person commented on how it was based on time consumption. He said that although he would love to see everyone’s video and listen to what they have to say that because it’s time based it would take too long. As a result he’d follow just the friend’s timeline.
This brings me back to twitter. How many friends do you have. Do you still use the public timeline or is your friend’s timeline filled with more than enough conversations not to need this?
I think it’s a really interesting conversation. How does the social media living room integrate into your daily activities.
Twitter is a global short messaging system that allows people to post what they are doing 140 characters at a time. For the moment it is a relatively new phenomenon therefore it’s not too hard to keep track of the conversations going on.
They are also geo logged. As you’re watching people’s messages you can see China say that they’re getting ready for the night ahead whilst in Europe people are going out to lunch. In the US people are complaining about having to wake up early in order to catch their planes, go for walks or in certain cases go to bed.
It’s amusing and it’s reminiscent of ten years ago when I spent 13hrs in a chatroom at a time when spending ten minutes online was expensive. it’s cyclical. One thing is popular, then is replaced by something else before becoming popular again.
One difference this time is the technology used. Google maps show where in the world people are tweeting from whilst the twitter site simply shows what people have written. It’s amusing to watch the world and what people are doing in it.
Recently I migrated my photos from Instagram to a WordPress blog. The process took some trial and error. The first step is to understand how to read JSON files and format them in a way that WordPress can use. The next step is to import that data into Wordpress.
To request your data follow this link, request the data and wait for an e-mail telling you that the files are ready to download. When the files are ready to download download them and unzip the files.
Convert from JSON to CSV
You will find photo directories listed by year and month. You will also get a few JSON files but the ones you want are the media.json files. With a tool like the Konbert app you can convert the files from JSON to CSV files. When the CSV file or files are ready open them in Google Sheets or other spreadsheet software and look at the columns.
The fields you will find are
Caption
Taken At
Location
Path
Stories
Videos
Photos
Although not essential you can add fields like author. If you see “stories” and “videos” remove these columns. The CSV importer plugin I used cannot import videos and stories automatically.
When this is done you should have a CSV file that has caption, taken at, location, and path. Keep the photo file structure as it is.
Installing WordPress Locally
The simplest Wordpress installation I found is Local. Within minutes you can have a wordpress blog setup and running on your local machine. The reason you want a local install is that JSON to CSV conversions can be messy so if you make a mistake it is easy to reset and start again.
It took several attempts before I managed to import all the images and get them to display properly. If I had imported those files to my production Wordpress Blog I would have spent hours deleting thousands of posts more than once.
Folder Structure
When you import your images to WordPress with the CSV importer tool you have the option of leaving them where they are or of importing them into the uploads/year/month folder structure. Be warned that if you let the importer tool import the images itself it will import all of the images and generate thumbnails. If you have 3900 images you will end up with 12,000 images in a single folder as thumbnails are generated.
I would recommend:
creating a folder for every year that you were on Instagram
renaming every Instagram folder from /yearmonth/ to month, for example from 202006 to /06/ in the 2020 folder.
placing each month in the appropriate year/month folder in uploads.
Preparing the CSV file.
For the next step, I would recommend saving a copy of the document as it is so that you can go back to it if you make a mistake.
If you have changed all of the yearmonth folders to a year/month/ folder structure then you can use find and replace to update the folder names. You can find and replace 202006 with 2020/06 and work recursively. This will take more time, but be tidier. The CSV importer tool does not keep imports tidy. If I had known this ahead of time I would have taken this additional step.
In the CSV file the path is relative. To be tidy I put the photo folders in /wp-content/uploads/photos/ and had to update the CSV document to reflect that. Although you can find and replace in Google Sheets I used Visual Studio code for the next step.
Originally the path will be something like photos/202006/filename.jpg. but as the images are in wp-content/uploads/photos WordPress will look in the wrong place. With Find and Replace I selected “/photos/” and replaced it with “http://localhost:10003/wp-content/uploads/photos/”. At this point, the CSV files were ready to be imported.
If the CSV file is prepared correctly you should see Caption, Taken at, Location and Path. When I imported I mapped it so that so that Title and Content and slug would be the caption and for slug to be the caption. I then mapped Taken On to Publish date and featured image to the image path.
If you have kept the image folders as they were when you unzipped the Instagram download then select “Use media images if already available” and “download post content external images to media.” The images will be copied from the photos folder into the correct folder for WordPress to use.
If you have already organised your images by year and month in the uploads folder then you do not need to check “download external images to your media as they are already there.
The Final Step
The Final Step is to find a theme that reflects how you. want your images to be displayed and share the new location of your photo library to your various social media profiles and networks.
As a final step if you find that an image does not load for single posts you can add this line of code after the PHP tag.
if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) { // check if the post has a Post Thumbnail assigned to it.
the_post_thumbnail( 'full' );
}
This is a lot faster than going through 3900 posts and adding an image to each individual post.
Conclusion
If everything works as expected you can now export a CSV file of your test blog and upload it and the appropriate files to your online photo blog.
After university, I estimated that I got to know of at least 600 people. I was on campus every day and I was out almost all the time. Whether it was in the edit suites, the library or the bar. I used to sit indoors with the bags as a non-smoker but within weeks I dressed for the English winter and started to stand outside, warmly dressed.
I went from being a solitary person looking after a table and belongings to short ten to fifteen-minute conversations with several dozen people a night. Such a process is a good way of getting to know people and to learn of projects that you want to work on.
That’s why you go to the edit suites, radio studios and other places. You have the opportunity to chat with people and to learn more about their projects and about technologies that you may not play with for your profession. That’s also when people asked me for help with editing. “How do I do this?”, “How do you do that?”, “Can we work together on that project”.
In post-university life it’s much harder to meet people and socialise like this. On the one hand, the pool of people is much larger. You’re dealing with thousands of people, rather than hundreds. You also need to find places where there are groups to connect with.
For a while, social media filled this role. So does work where you’re in the real world rather than the virtual. I see office life as virtual because when you’re working in an office you’re not meeting people in person. You don’t have the same opportunities for friendships.
Recently I’ve been volunteering at Geneva-based events to meet new people and see interesting projects. It’s a series of events where we’re needed for three or four hours every few days. It’s great if you want free access to an event but I find that it lowers the chance to meet people.
The best events to volunteer for or participate in are those where people are present for the entire time of the event. You meet them at the stands, you meet them at the drinks and other events, and you meet them in the evening. It’s a way of becoming a close group, even if just for a week. It did result in follow up projects.
I would love to work where I’m in the real world, meeting people and collaborating with a number of teams in person rather than by e-mail or over the phone. In a recent contract, an entire unit came to my end of contract drinks. That doesn’t happen every time.
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