Marc Chambers

Lots of buzz about who will be the Instagram of video. But Instagram had a last-mover advantage. The market was ready for Instagram. They craved it. They stuffed as many camera apps onto their phone as possible, but none of them delivered quite what Instagram did. Kevin and his team seized an opportunity to get it right.

I’m not sure we’re there with video.

The Wall Street Journal actually has an article about this today, and they toss out some numbers that “millions of people” are using video sharing mobile apps. I wonder if this is the case, or if we’re seeing false engagement numbers from Facebook’s new “authorize the app to view the content” methodology. Google+’s engagement metrics come to mind.

I’ve seen more than my fair share of friends on Facebook posting links from Socialcam, including my own mother. And I’m fairly certain the majority of them aren’t even sure what Socialcam is. It’s anecdotal, sure. But you don’t see that kind of false engagement from Instagram, because it’s just not built that way. You don’t count as an “Instagram user” just by viewing a photo. Direct comparisons are tricky.

We’ll see a couple of decent exits for these startups, but from a product perspective and from a consumer interest perspective, I’m still wondering: are people really interested in doing this right now? Or, at the very least, are we going to need to wait for mobile bandwidth to catch up?

For every positive article about Microsoft locking up a new partner, releasing some great hardware or landing a great app, there’s another that points out they have “rapidly declining market share.”

The latest is Dan Frommer at ReadWriteWeb, who thinks Microsoft’s “mobile comeback” is “looking terrible.” He points out they were at 36% market share in 2007 in contrast with their current 3.9%.

In 2007, Palm OS, Symbian, Blackberry and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile ruled the smartphone roost. All of those are now gone or irrelevant.

But it’s important to remember: in 2007, smartphones weren’t for “average consumers.” In the minds of the 2007-era consumer, smartphones were for people who wore suits and traded stock. Apple changed all that with their iPhone. And now in 2012, the era of business-class devices, pushed top-down from IT departments, has given way to the bring-your-own-device culture. IT departments have been reminded that employees and businessmen are also consumers, ones who couldn’t resist the allure of the iPhone and Android.

Palm is gone. Symbian serves the faithful. Blackberry struggles with internal politics as they try to re-align themselves. Of that pack, only Microsoft has successfully re-launched their brand as a total consumer play, ignoring their usual modus operandi and shaking off the need to be backwards compatible. All this while they still have thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of Windows Mobile devices still active in the field.

No new Windows Mobile devices are being sold, and Windows Phone is a scrappy underdog that has only recently secured a faithful, capable and committed hardware partner. The “Microsoft smartphone market share” plummets as aging Windows Mobile devices are swapped out, and nobody at Microsoft had any delusions they’d convert those folks to Windows Phone users. The logical next step for those users is Android. Microsoft doesn’t serve them anymore. They’ve re-invented.

While it makes a great fatalist headline, try to keep it in perspective when you read the horrors and see the graphs that show a number dropping from the high 30s to a scant 2 or 3. It’s just not a proper comparison. This is a new business that has to grow. And of all the old stodgy tech companies, few can grow a consumer brand quite like Microsoft. Just ask Sony.

You know who’s a smart feller? Whomever had HashMap.put() return the previous value.

I saw that Wal-Mart is putting the new iPad on sale at 12:01am tomorrow, and it made me remember how much of a shit show a Midnight launch at Wal-Mart can be.

In remembering, I began running down a list of midnight launches I’ve been to at the Wal-Mart in Crestview, FL:

• World Of Warcraft Collector’s Edition
• Nintendo GameCube
• Playstation Portable

I stopped there. Oof. It’s amazing I’m able to function in normal society.

Never let it appear that you’re not giving anything up in a deal.

Show your users that you care. Don’t give them this “You have 1 unlocks available.” Type a few extra characters.

string + ((isPlural) ? “s” : “”)

Bam.

This isn’t something they make a big deal about in the SDK. You’ll realize what they’re up to if you read the PHP example code.

You need to call

https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_id=(APP ID)&client_secret=(APP SECRET)&grant_type=client_credentials

And it’ll give you the access_token necessary to call /me/score.

The more you know.

Once you’ve got your Visual Studio + ASP MVC 4 + Azure thingy going, it’s actually pretty cool.

Double thumbs.