Instagram > Facebook + Twitter
Just playing around with ifttt.com (If This Then That) which is basically a very simple scripting tool, which let you create tasks between your services like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google Reader etc.
I’ve been using Instagram for over a year but there’s one thing that I’ve been annoyed with, namely the integration with Twitter & Facebook. When you post a photo you can share to these services as well a bunch of others but that’s the two I use.
Before the facebook integration looked like this. The image caption becomes a status message, which is fine, but the photo shows up only as a thumbnail. When you click it you get sent to the image link on instagram.com where you can’t really interact.
Same goes for Twitter’s native apps, but it’s there it’s worse. Basically what your followers see is the Image caption + the URL which you have to click to even see the preview. If you don’t write a very descriptive caption, the tweet becomes quite cryptic.
So I set up two simple tasks to see if it’d improve the integration. It’s very straight forward to set up a task. You start with choosing the service, in this case Instagram, then a trigger. In my case:
1. If [instagram post] then [twitter img post]
2. if [instagram post] then [facebook img post]
I posted a photo and waited for the result, and to my joy the Facebook status is now a photo update instead of a link post. To start with, the preview it self is larger than the link post, which is nice, and when you click on the image it’s enlarged as if you posted a photo directly on facebook and people can interact with it. The photo is also added to an album so all your instagram photos are saved in one place and is browsable.
The integration with Twitter is apparent mostly in the native (and third party) apps. In the desktop app it’s still just a text and a link, but you can see in the URL that it points to pic.twitter.com/ instead of instagr.am/ and when you click on it, it’s directly enlarged in the app to full size.
In the Twitter app for iPhone the image is shown just below the tweet, when you’ve clicked it in the timeline, instead of open up the in-app browser meaning it loads faster. It’s a simple little thing to do, but enhance the experience, both for you and for your audience. The photos are still stored on instagram but the interaction is better on the services you post to.
It should be said that there’s not really any difference in the web-experience of twitter. Images posted on twitter directly and instagram are treated pretty much the same way. They both show up in the timeline, as well as in the photo gallery.
vs.
This is just one among a zillion use cases of ifttt.com. I think the service is pretty brilliant, in it’s simplicity and efficiency. I haven’t tried many other tasks yet but will definitely make the internet to work for me.
