Interact with Instagram directly from the Web

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

Did you know that Instagram profiles on the Web are now live? Until now, all interactions on Instagram (purchased by Facebook earlier this year) took place entirely on smartphones. Here’s my profile pageif you’d like to see what they look like.

Sweet and simple, right? I like that profiles are only for the purpose of viewing, commenting on, and liking photos. But snapping, creating and sharing photos is still mobile-only as if to preserve the simplicity and pureness of the experience.

To see your profile, go to instagram.com/[username].

What can I do with Instagram Web profiles?

Whether you have your own account or an organization account for your nonprofit, you can share your own profile with anyone you want to see your Instagram photos. You can also follow other users, comment and like photos, and edit your profile directly from the Web.

All photos you’ve shared to Instagram are included in your Web profile.

What do you think about Instagram’s new offering?

Related

• Is Instagram useful for nonprofit marketing? (Socialbrite)

• 6 creative ways to use photos to increase engagement on your Facebook page (Socialbrite)

The post Instagram launches Web profile pages appeared first on Socialbrite.

By Prabhas Pokharel
MobileActive.org

The precursors to mobile phones were walkie-talkies, and the first generation of mobile phone networks only supported voice communications. With second generation networks and a happy accident came SMS, and only with the third generation networks came mobile data services in the form of GPRS.

Most applications using mobile phones these days tend to use these newer channels of communication: SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a part of mobile phone communications. This article profiles interesting ways in which voice technology is being used for social work all around the world.

Voice transmission has a singular advantage over SMS and data transmissions—it channels human, spoken  language directly. Users of many literacy levels can use voice technology with keypad and voice navigation, and applications can be run in local languages. Users can issue commands and requests in their natural language, and thus communicate more accurately. The problem, unfortunately, lies on the receiving end. Voice data is much harder to process automatically than text or other data. It requires considerable technical effort (or a lot of person-power) to parse and separate voice data (and even then accuracy isn’t perfect), and searching voice data still remains a nearly impossible feat. Second, airtime costs tend to run higher than text message costs.

Yet, there are a few projects in existence that leverage the talking capabilities of mobile phone for interesting ways to deliver information.

Question answering services

Two of the more projects deal with providing a very simple service—answers to people’s questions.

Question Box provides a question-answering service in India and Uganda. In India, boxes are installed in slums and villages that connect users to operators that will answer questions. In Uganda, users can call in with any mobile phone to have operators answer questions. The operators have access to a repository of previously asked questions (and answers), the Internet if available, and in Uganda, a custom-built offline search engine and database built specifically for the project.

Avaaj Otalo provides an audio community forum for farmers in rural Gujarat. Working with an organization that had a previously popular radio program, Otalo provided a call-in number where farmers can ask questions and answers some too! Navigating a VoiceXML-programmed menu with the keypad or one-word commands, users are also able to listen to archives of the radio program.

Question Box avoids having to process users’ questions by adding a human listener in the loop, while Avaaj Otalo avoids processing by organizing their collection of audio prompts with an externally organized menu. The programs have yet to deal with the problem of cost, however, and subsidize their information querying to users. Otalo operates with a toll-free number. Question Box provides the phones to call from in India, and in Uganda, Grameen Community Knowledge Workers provide the mobile phones that calls are made from.

Wikipedia and News on the phone

MobilED, operating in South African schools developed a program that delivered Wikipedia over mobile phones. Users texted in a query, and they would be called back, with a speech synthesizer reading them the text of the Wikipedia entry requested. Users could also upload voice-based edits to articles, or create audio entries if nothing existed on a topic. Again, queries were text-based and thus easy to parse, and only the information delivery was based on voice. The cost issue was more severe, however, and MobilED eventually abandoned the project in favor of data based and cheaper cell phone technologies.

Freedom Fone, a Knight-funded project based in Zimbabwe, is working on providing news using an audio channel. In an environment where the press is highly repressed, and access to news is scant, Freedom Fone plans to implement a solution where users can either call in or text in, and be called back with the latest news information. The cost structure has yet to be determined.

Re-creating the Web, or wikis over audio

Perhaps the most ambitious project that uses the voice platform is IBM’s Spoken Web (also known as the World Wide Telecom Web) Project. The idea here is to create a parallel of the World Wide Web, but all on the audio platform. The project has a concept of voice-sites that are linked to specific phone numbers, and has already built a system called VoiceGen to create VoiceXML content using audio input. The group had an initial deployment of a subset of this technology, in the form of VoiKiosks that allowed users to listen to information from different NGOs and upload professional advertisements that saw high rates of usage.

MIT CSAIL is also developing audio wikis, or “local repositories of audio information,” that could be edited and created using audio, essentially re-creating what wikis are on the Internet on a mobile-accessible, audio platform. The system is not fully developed yet, but deployment is planned for India, in conjunction with Microsoft Research India

What are the barriers to voice services?

Voice has some benefits that you just can’t run away from, especially when it comes to low literacy consumers. The question then is why voice technologies are not more of a player in the world today. Automatization difficulty seems serious, but as Question Box, Avaaj Otalo, and IBM’s projects have shown, not an obstacle that can’t be overcome.

Cost seems to be more serious of an issue — the real bottleneck for sustainable voice-tech to be deployed. MobilED moved on from the voice-based program to others because of high cost. South Africa voice costs are indeed high; the International Telecommunication Union reported that 2008 costs for one minute of on-network airtime during peak hours was US $0.59 by Purchasing Power Parity. On the other hand, costs in India are cheap; the same minute costs $0.07 in India (Data from MobileActive’s MobileData page). We hope that the number of voice applications coming out of India is an indication of these cheap costs, and some of these projects soon cross the cost-barrier.

This post was first made on MobileActive.org. Photo courtesy of gopal1035 on Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

The post Voice-based technology aids social change appeared first on Socialbrite.

In “The White Man’s Burden – Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,” William Easterly’s frustration at large-scale, top-down, bureaucracy-ridden development projects runs to an impressive 384 pages. While Easterly dedicates most of his book to markets, economics and the mechanics of international development itself, he talks little of information and communication technology (ICT). The index carries no reference to ‘computers,’ ‘ICT’ or even plain old ‘technology.’

But there is an entry for ‘cell phones.’

E. F. Schumacher, a fellow economist and the man widely recognized as the father of the appropriate technology movement, spent a little more time in his books studying technology issues. His seminal 1973 book – “Small is Beautiful – The Study of Economics as if People Mattered” – reacted to the imposition of alien development concepts on Third World countries, and he warned early of the dangers and difficulties of advocating the same technological practices in entirely different societies and environments. Although his earlier work focused more on agri-technology and large-scale infrastructure projects (dam building was a favorite ‘intervention’ at the time), his theories could easily have been applied to ICTs – as they were in later years.

Things have come a long way since 1973. For a start, many of us now have mobile phones, the most rapidly adopted technology in history. In what amounts to little more than the blink of an eye, mobiles have given us a glimpse of their potential to help us solve some of the most pressing problems of our time. As the evidence mounts, I have one question: If mobiles truly are as revolutionary and empowering as they appear to be – particularly in the lives of some of the poorest members of society – then do we have a moral duty, in the ICT for Development (ICT4D) community at least, to see that they fulfill that potential?

You see, I’m a little worried. If we draw parallels between the concerns of Easterly and Schumacher and apply them to the application of mobile phones as a tool for social and economic development, there’s a danger that the development community may end up repeating the same mistakes of the past. We have a golden opportunity here that we can’t afford to miss.

But miss it we may. Since 2003 I’ve been working exclusively in the mobile space, and I’ve come to my own conclusions about where we need to be focusing more of our attention if we’re to take advantage of the opportunity ahead of us. Don’t get me wrong – we do need to be looking at the bigger picture – but there’s not room at the top for all of us.

I, for one, am more than happy to be working at the bottom. Not only do I find grassroots NGOs particularly lean and efficient (often with the scarcest of funding and resources), but they also tend to get less bogged down with procedure, politics and egos, and are often able to react far more quickly to changing environments than their larger counterparts. Being local, they also tend to have much greater context for their environments, and in activism terms they’re more likely to be able to operate under the radar of dictatorial regimes, meaning they can often engage a local and national populace in ways where larger organizations might struggle.

So, waving my grassroots NGO flag, I see a central problem of focus in the mobile applications space. Let me explain. If we take the “Long Tail ” concept first talked about by Chris Anderson and apply it to the mobile space, we get something like this. I call it “Social Mobile’s Long Tail”.

What it demonstrates is that our tendency to aim for sexy, large-scale, top-down, capital- and time-intensive mobile solutions simply results in the creation of tools which only the larger, more resource-rich NGOs are able to adopt and afford. Having worked with grassroots NGOs for over 15 years, I strongly believe that we need to seriously refocus some of our attention there to avoid developing our own NGO “digital divide.”

To do this we need to think about low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, affordable, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. This is something I regularly write about, and it’s a challenge I’m more than happy to throw down to the developer community.

Low-hanging fruit

Another key problem that we have emerges as a symptom of the first. Because larger international development agencies, by their very nature, tend to preoccupy themselves with the bigger issues, they often inadvertently neglect the simple, easier-to-fix problems (the “low hanging fruit” as some people like to call it). The Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) are good examples of the kinds of targets which are far easier to miss than hit.

In mobile terms, using the technology to enhance basic communications is a classic “low hanging fruit”. After all, that’s what mobile phones do, and communication is fundamental to all NGO activities, particularly those working in the kinds of infrastructure-challenged environments often found in the developing world. Despite this, there are few tools available that take advantage of one of the most prolific mobile communication channels available to grassroots NGOs – the text message (or SMS).

Much of my own work with FrontlineSMS has sought to solve this fundamental problem, and in places such as Malawi – where Josh Nesbit, FrontlineSMS, a laptop and one hundred recycled mobile phones has helped revolutionise healthcare delivery to 250,000 rural Malawians – the benefits are loud and clear. In other countries, where activities of international aid organizations may be challenged or restricted by oppressive, dictatorial regimes, grassroots NGOs often manage to maintain operations and often provide the only voice for the people. In Zimbabwe, Kubatana.net have been using FrontlineSMS extensively to engage a population not only starved of jobs, a meaningful currency and a functioning democracy, but also news and information. In Afghanistan, an international NGO is using FrontlineSMS to provide security alerts to their staff and fieldworkers.
The software is seen as a crucial tool in helping keep people safe in one of the world’s most volatile environments. With a little will, what can be done in Zimbabwe and Afghanistan can be done anywhere where similar oppression exists.

In cases such as these – and there are many more – we need to stop simply talking about “what works” and start to get “what works” into the hands of the NGOs that need it the most. That’s a challenge that I’m happy to throw down to the ICT4D community. There’s only a certain amount of talking and critiquing we can, and should, do.

There are, of course, many issues and challenges – some technical, some cultural, others economic and geographical. The good news is that few are insurmountable, and we can remove many of them by simply empowering the very people we’re seeking to help. The emergence of home grown developer communities in an increasing number of African countries, for example, presents the greatest opportunity yet to unlock the social change potential of mobile technology. Small-scale, realistic, achievable, replicable, bottom-up development such as that championed by the likes of Easterly and Schumacher may hardly be revolutionary, but what would be is our acknowledgement of the mistakes of the past, and a co-ordinated effort to help us avoid making them all over again.

I spent the best part of my university years critiquing the efforts of those who went before me. Countless others have done the same. Looking to the future, how favourably will the students and academics of tomorrow reflect on our efforts? If the next 30 years aren’t to read like the last then we need to rethink our approach, and rethink it now.

This entry originally appeared at Kiwanja.net.

The post Social mobile: A moral duty to do more? appeared first on Socialbrite.