Send me a WhatsApp ... on IG

We love IG.  Arguably, Instagram is Jamaica’s most popular social media app.  Its got a plethora of ever-expanding features to deliver up multiple dopamine hits with every use.  In short, Instagram is addictive.

What do you do when you have a hit product everyone loves?  Well, you mess it up of course.  Remember Classic Coke?

We should have seen this coming when Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg led the multibillion-dollar acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

In a move that Instagram users are likely going to hate, IG owners Facebook are reportedly considering merging the backend with the equally popular WhatsApp and waning in popularity Facebook making the three apps interoperable.

The result: three stand-alone platforms across which you can send messages to any user.  Users of any and all apps would be able to send a message to users on another platform, without leaving the app.  Sounds cool?  I don’t think so.

WhatsApp supports End-to-End (E2E) encryption for messages.  Currently, Facebook offers limited E2E encryption for messages, and Instagram does not offer the feature.  E2E encryption keeps messages secure from the government, law enforcement, hackers and advertisers; the last of which is key to Facebook’s business model.

“We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private,” explained Facebook in a statement to the UK based Guardian.  "We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks. As you would expect, there is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work,” they added.

Beyond message privacy, there is user data privacy.  Facebook’s challenges with this topic are well documented.

Privacy aside, the proposed interoperability among three of the worlds most popular apps used, often daily or at least by me, by billions of people and businesses around the globe raises anti-trust questions.

Of note, the founders of both WhatsApp and Instagram have resigned from Facebook within the last year.

What can we do?  Perhaps it's time for us to redirect our digital addictions to a different platform.

Social Stardom In a Real Sense

Event organizers Corve DaCosta and Shane Bennett

The irony is, it took a social media event for me to meet a social media star.

Thanks to Digital Media Week Jamaica #DMWJamaica, I was able to meet in person and physically mingle with a few social media stars that I follow or converse with regularly.

#DMWJamaica is an “unconference” that seeks to share social success stories and highlight Jamaicans excelling in the social media space.  The four-day series of events included a panel discussion at the trendy ATL Showroom on Tuesday, June 29, 2016.

RJR’s own Krystal Tomlinson, a star in her own right across multimedia media formats, hosted the panel on The New Rules of Social Stardom.  The group of experts included “certified student” @OneRomone, multi-tasker @NicoleMcLarenCampbell, fitness and nutrition expert @IAMKimilaMcDonald and transformational coach @PatriceJWhite.

#DMW Panelists Kimila McDonald, Nicole McLaren-Campbell,  Romone Robinson, Krystal Tomlinson (Host) and Patrice White.

Real is often overused these days, but “real” is exactly how the conversation is best described.  The presenters were revealing and raw while sharing their personal experiences, challenges, and successes.  Here's an interesting point, their least favourite platform: Snapchat.

The panel was preceded by an eye-opening keynote by Dr. Anissa Holmes of Jamaica Cosmetic Dental Services.  The audience who clearly had a preference for Instagram (IG) was schooled in benefits of Facebook.  Dr. Holmes opening discussed her methodology and impressive returns on her investment in the platform.

Dr. Anissa Holmes

She clearly illustrated the power and potential of the world’s most successful social media network and provided tips on how others good navigate the platform for their own success.  Notable, she said, “You have to have your business right first!”  Social media can’t make a business better, more efficient, or more appealing.  Start with a good business model and then leverage social media to draw attention, engagement and profits to that model.

#DMWJamaica continues with a Women in Digital Tech charity event this evening at the Courtyard by Marriott.  Congrats to @CorveDaCosta, @iamsgb and the team for a stellar event.

Tech4Life airs on @RJR94FM.com every Wednesday morning at 8:15 am.

IG Panic

So, Instagram (IG) announced that it was experimenting with changing its timeline.  Instead of the reverse chronological order we’ve all become accustomed to, they now want to tweak the algorithm to show the “most relevant posts” first.

Sound familiar?  Well, it should.  Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world, tweaked its timeline back in 2009 to ditch the chronological model for an “interest and tastes” model designed to ensure that you’re not bored by a bunch of random posts (from say, the errant cousin you can’t unfriend because their family) and leave the platform.

The detail of the algorithm is a closely guarded trade secret, but presumably, they take your likes, shares, comments and several other factors into account to make a guess about what you want to see and what you don’t.

Despite MUCH initial rebellion, the modified timeline was eventually accepted by the near 1.6 billion users.  So successful was the final roll out of Facebook’s modified algorithm, microblogging site Twitter attempted their own tweak earlier this year.

If unlike me, you’re following 10 accounts on Twitter, you probably won’t have a problem.  But, the more accounts you follow, the more tweets are going to fill your timeline, the more likely that you’re going to miss some tweets during your periodic social media check in.

Twitter introduced “While You Were Away” a collection of tweets it determined are most interesting to you based on your previous favorites, re-posts, mentions and the like (no pun intended).

On Monday, March 28, IG users were flooded with “Turn On Notification” posts imploring them to guarantee no missed posts from their favorite accounts.  Celebrities, like John Mayr, issued statements appealing to IG to abandon their new policy.  The thing is, it's not policy.  It is an experiment.  IG never announced that it was actually changing its initial reverse chronological timeline.

Still, mark my words, a change is coming.  And we better jump on board.

As social networks get more popular and by extension more crowded, we need ways to filter out content that is just not relevant.  Algorithms do the heavily lifting aka filtering.  If you think you can manage to do the digital social media filtering on your own and still have a physical social life, by all means try.  IG will likely make the algorithm optional for its 400 million users.

Either way, there is no need to panic … unless of course, you have no data/wifi.

Tech4Life airs every Wednesday morning on @RJR94FM.