What's New

For the first time this August Instagram beat Twitter in daily active users. Not only that, but users spent 50% more time on Instagram than users did on Twitter. Hopefully this makes Mark Zuckerberg feel better about the botched Facebook IPO and lousy performance thereafter. It does support his avowed focus on mobile bolstered by the battery of new attributes that Facebook has launched recently. These include their mobile ad network which uses Facebook Connect as a way to tap into outside apps and deliver ads targeted to individual profiles (so that’s why they did it!) and the new Facebook mobile app which has been rebuilt with new technology. Using HTML5 wasn’t fast enough, so the updated version now loads your newsfeed and images twice as fast (the #1 user complaint before). But other than demonstrating that the brains at Facebook, along with a lot of other people, noticed that mobile was going to be big, what does this news tell us about the changing dynamics of the web? Most clearly it underscores the power of the visual web. Continue Reading