Daryl Baxter.

Facebook Camera, The End Of Instagram?

I first signed onto Instagram way back in August, and I thought it was a good idea, but i could do the same thing on Twitter without a filter.

When Facebook announced they had bought Instagram, a lot of friends suddenly signed up and jumped on the Instagram bandwagon. By the way, this just shows how much of an influence Facebook can incredibly be.

I’ve been using it a lot more since i actually know people this time that i’m following, and i’ve started to use it much more than Twitter now, which i’m only using as a kind of RSS Feed.

But yesterday as i’m walking through London town, i read that Facebook have brought an app of their own, much similar to Instagram.

At first it was confusing, why have two similar products, of which one is in the processes of being officially acquired?

But then i realised of two things, they’ve been trying to redo photos on Facebook the same way Timeline has been to profiles, and it’s the start of the transition.

Now, viewing photos on a PC has changed significantly in the past year. Instead of clicking on a photo and being able to easily go to the album, a black background surrounds the selected photo, and dependant on the privacy setting, it’s either going to be the only photo you see, or you’ll see an album.

Also uploading photos. The feature that has stood out for me has been facial recognition as soon as the photos are uploaded. To be fair, 80% of the time, it’s tagging a robot as a lad i know from years ago, but the idea is still promising.

This would be the work of Sofa and Push Pop Press, acquired a little over a year ago, and presumably started work on the Facebook Camera app.

Anyone you know uploading photos on a mobile device from Facebook knows that to even think of uploading an album you may have stored on your device is just asking for trouble.

Then the ‘transition’ i spoke of.

I believe that as soon as the Instagram deal closes, which is, all the investors and board members agree and go through all the paperwork, it’s not a simple ‘yes we’ll buy you’, these two apps will merge, bringing Facebook’s users over to Instagram, and when a user is clicking the ‘Photos’ tab to their left, they’ll also be given a link below to an ‘Instagram’ app, which will be able to import all your photos from your account, to your Facebook profile.

Maybe we’ll see this by the end of 2012, but i don’t believe we’ll be seeing 2 apps this time next year.

Flickr: A Wasted Opportunity.

Hard to think that it was only a year after Flickr launched, that Yahoo acquired them in 2005.

It wasn’t for a couple years i remember until you could only log in with a Yahoo account. A pointless step of course, it was only until you could log in with Facebook that i decided to make an account. But this was around 2010, far too late.

It appeared on the Internet way before instagram, way before any kind of photo social networking site started to become common use. Because of Yahoo and their corporate, confusing way, it’s now wasted, trying to catch up in features that Google+, Instagram, and Facebook are thriving with.

So today i came across an article that goes into explicit detail of the history and the uncertain future that faces it.

Flickr is still very valuable. It has a massive database of geotagged, Creative Commons- and Getty-licensed, subject-tagged photos. But sadly, Yahoo’s steady march of incompetence doesn’t bode well for making use of these valuable properties. If the Internet really were a series of tubes, Yahoo would be the leaking sewage pipe, covering everything it comes in contact with in watered-down shit.

Source.