I had much the same feeling about silly mobile apps with ridiculous filters prior to actually using Instagram, but the truth is that (when used appropriately) those filters do actually improve the aesthetic quality of phone photography.
It's easy for some people to go overboard or act like they're a deeply intellectual thinker just because they've taken a brooding selfie in black and white, but misuse shouldn't be conflated with uselessness.
I believe Instagram's rapid growth was greatly helped by leveraging access to Facebook's social graph. By the time Facebook catched on and tried to limit access, Instagram was too big.
Facebook likely won't make the same mistake of allowing something similar to happen again.
> I really don't like the tone of many parts of this article.
"Again and again, we warned y’all that Facebook, owner of all photos of people on the Internet and the most popular mobile photo app, was going to crush you eventually."
"Apps and services like Cluster, Albumatic, Keepsy, Swirl, Flock, Kicksend, Kaptur, and dozens of others are destined for the dustbin of Internet history."
I suspect most of these were headed there anyway, no offense to anyone working on them.
As someone who isn't doing web programming, this "app culture" is grinding my gears.
I respect a fellow coder's work. I'm sure a lot of hard work went into all those applications listed there (of which, frankly, I haven't heard, because if I want to share something with my friends I upload it on my server and be done with it), but people ought to be more aware of their own smallness. You don't base your enterprise on making (and hosting, and maintaining!) the nth fucking website that essentially offers something that should simply be a feature of a social network. Especially if it's something like a shared album. Who the hell invests money into a business whose end product is basically one week's work away for the company which already provides services to 99.99% percent of the people need that product?
Wishing for a niche to be there doesn't magically make it poof into existence.
though it is easy to create such a service, sometimes big companies just don't mess too much with things that are working just well and there is a room for niche products. still, it is very risky to offer a products only to someone else's users - you are out at the moment that the big company decides to implement the feature you are offering.
technically, yahoo,google and microsoft(icq,myspace,friendter too) had all the resources to create most of the now popular online services like insagram, facebook, tumblr but they did not and now are buying these or compete with them fruitlessly.
couldn't facebook create an app with filters? yes, but they bought instagram because of the userbase. so I agree with you that these are bad investments but only when the projects don't have something that could not be recreated with few engineers.
If you build your house on a river-bank, you can hardly be surprised when a flood washes it away.
I guess that's the risk with any entrepreneurial work, that someone will get to market faster or build on an existing user base (in this case, a completely unmatchable user base). Surely though, if a whole business idea can be trumped by a new feature on someone else's site, that'd warrant some stronger scrutiny.
Probably most people don't notice or care, but Facebook introduces so many artifacts into jpegs, there's got to be room for a startup that actually doesn't compress the crap out of images.
flickr is actually quite popular amongst my photographer friends; artists and doodlers seem to use deviantart.
Facebook is a place for photos of people's faces, really. If the artifacts prevent you from seeing someone's face, the picture is probably too small to begin with. Putting other kinds of photos on Facebook (like, say, Cinnabon(TM)) always baffled me, but people do it anyway.
The average Facebooker doesn't know what that is and doesn't care. Just like so many people listen to music on iPhone or laptop speakers, quality seems to no longer matter.
Music on an iPhone with headphones is probably better than what 90% of the people in the eighties/nineties ever heard.
CD systems' speakers (when not Hi-Fi) have worse sound than middle of the road headphones, and cassette had like 8 bit definition (and noise, wow, flutter and other nice stuff to degrade the sound).
with increasingly decent phone cameras, and everybody seemingly buying a DSLR to start a "Johns Photography" page, facebook will have to respond to this - currently their compression is horrible
I'm one of those entrepreneurs whose startup is destined for the Internet trash bin (or whatever that was).
Yes, Facebook is a behemoth in the photo space. But there are many facets to people's photo libraries than mere sharing and collaboration. I've actually been happy to see fellow photo start ups tackling some of hose more interesting problems.
No doubt this solves a pain point for many. But I don't know if I see it as crushing many startups. The thing with Facebook is that people will come up with ways to work around the limitations of the platform. It's got that much momentum.
Photos are a big space and I'm happy to see other companies tackling more than just the social sharing problems that in my opinion have largely been solved already.
Just in case you didn't trust your photos/albums/comments with Facebook (or Google), you could try a privacy respecting, user-owned, self-hosted solution (self-hosting coming soon):
Are you talking about the certificate problem or a DNS error. If its a certificate problem, its because each user in our system generates their own self-signed certificates. If it was an actual error - Some windows/DNS servers query "AAAA" records currently which gets our DNS server code in trouble - hopefully we can fix this soon.
Sorry I've been out of the Facebook app game for a while, but isn't there a Facebook API for photos? Couldn't anyone do what Facebook is doing here, leveraging the Facebook userbase and their unrivalled quantities of photos? Of course users would still have to discover the app as opposed to it being part of the stock FB experience, but this doesn't necessarily sound like the death knell for every startup who wants to build a social/collaborative photo album service.
Another question is: does hashpix have the license to do what I does? When people post a picture of twitter, that doesn't necessarily mean the give the license/rights for someone to include it in his album in another service.
To be completely honest, I haven't really thought about that. I haven't really really looked into that either.
However, I am basing this attempt on the belief that, if Twitter, TwitPic and Instagram can 'show' me your photos when I search for a particular hashtag, it automatically implies that each of them have acquired the redistribution rights.
At no point in the process am I claiming that I own these photos; in fact, all the photos link back to their original places. I'm merely collating symbolic links to them. In a sense, I'm (sort of) indexing them just the way a search engine would.
Am I making sense or am I being escapist with my answers here? Do let me know. I'd like to believe I am not breaking any laws or infringing any copyrights but IANAL, so I'm not really sure. :)
Thanks for the insightful question. You made me realize something that I had completely missed in my enthusiasm to code. :)
As someone who doesn't have a Facebook account I hope that "Facebook does it" isn't going to be a reason to stop or start. That being said lucky Facebook rarely does something interesting or original :-)
> But we’re deadpooling all of ‘em, effective immediately.
I really don't like the tone of many parts of this article.
> Facebook is just too big to fail when it comes to normal people and photos.
The same could have been said about places.