fb the web site is super easy to replace, fb the network of 'everyone on the world who does not live in china' is not
― iatee, Monday, 9 April 2012 21:22 (twelve years ago) link
the weird thing about instagram as social network is that it's pretty hard to discover new stuff on it, I don't ever really "stumble across" anything on it without a good amount of effort (looking at photos that the other people you're following have liked is the best way I guess)
people who have a lot of fans on instagram seem to do it through using 8 million hashtags on every photo which is just super tedious and dumb
― dmr, Monday, 9 April 2012 21:27 (twelve years ago) link
I don't really understand the backlash here, it's mostly coming from people that check their FB like all day on who commented on their Instagram posts and it doesn't make any sense other than yeah it's cool to hate FB.
― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Monday, 9 April 2012 21:29 (twelve years ago) link
how come instagram ate flickr's lunch?
(NB have never used the former, but use flickr on the reg)
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 April 2012 22:56 (twelve years ago) link
flickr can't decide if it wants to be social or professional
also (I'm guessing) really bad iphone integration
― swaghand (dayo), Monday, 9 April 2012 22:57 (twelve years ago) link
yeah the flickr app is pretty terrible
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 April 2012 23:03 (twelve years ago) link
lol flickr
― markers, Monday, 9 April 2012 23:06 (twelve years ago) link
wait a minute everybody, markers has an opinion about flickr
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 April 2012 23:10 (twelve years ago) link
I never started a flickr account cause I realized putting my photos on the site just made me feel like a shitty photographer
― iatee, Monday, 9 April 2012 23:14 (twelve years ago) link
whereas stuff like instagram makes everyone feel like a great photographer
My flickr profile has no coherence since it's half shitty cell phone pics from 2006 and half semi-artsy pictures I took on vacation.
― mh, Monday, 9 April 2012 23:15 (twelve years ago) link
yeah i get the feeling that a lot of people see flickr as like a permanent showcase instead of a streaming conversation, there a hesitation to use it unless you're really "proud" of a particular picture.. i guess instagram is more disposable and immediate, like a tweet rather than a blog post? if so, i can see why they're considered competitors for FB, or something that FB wants to own
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 April 2012 23:18 (twelve years ago) link
flickr was around at the right point to where they could have diverged and done well in multiple spaces, but instead Yahoo bought them and then did jack shit for yeeeears
― mh, Monday, 9 April 2012 23:20 (twelve years ago) link
flickr really did seem like the future for a little while.. it was the first real "web page that acts like a full-featured app" that i ever saw.
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 April 2012 23:24 (twelve years ago) link
I think flickr actually costs yahoo money because of the unlimited storage for pro accounts, idk
― swaghand (dayo), Monday, 9 April 2012 23:25 (twelve years ago) link
instagram prob largely own its success to the fact that its not a full featured app
― lag∞n, Monday, 9 April 2012 23:26 (twelve years ago) link
like you open it and the camera is on, you press a button to take a picture, then you press another button to share
Nah, not for that reason, at least. Storage for photos is relatively cheap, even now with really high-res ones.
― mh, Monday, 9 April 2012 23:27 (twelve years ago) link
i actually pay real money to flickr yearly. does anyone do that with instagram?
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 9 April 2012 23:27 (twelve years ago) link
instagram wins because their entire product has one use, and they're just starting to flip into a second by letting third-party apps send pictures to their cloud. Pretty much one of the best cases of doing one thing really well.
― mh, Monday, 9 April 2012 23:28 (twelve years ago) link
the pictures I take with it always look shitty so I don't use it
― diamanda ram dass (Edward III), Monday, 9 April 2012 23:51 (twelve years ago) link
nah instagram had no revenue at all xp
― iatee, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 00:10 (twelve years ago) link
"We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all." - zuck
does not sound like a guy who is super thrilled bout his billion dollar baby
― iatee, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 00:12 (twelve years ago) link
He's taken it as far as it could possibly go based on its original functionality. Now the only thing left to do is progressively convert it into a multi-billion dollar, nearly useless, privacy-destroying piece of shit. So, where's the fun in that?
― Mr. Peabody (Aimless), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 00:22 (twelve years ago) link
Even Google - by whom almost every single startup dreams of getting bought up - haven't acquired that many companies (100 or so iirc). This is Facebook's equivalent of the YouTube acquisition - but YouTube already was one of the biggest websites on earth and Instagram is a currently popular phone app. Obviously I'm lol old and can't understand this new world of upside-down commerce.
― You always tell me: "Perhacs Perhacs Perhacs" (seandalai), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 00:51 (twelve years ago) link
youtube for $1.65b vs. instagram for $1b
― iatee, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 00:54 (twelve years ago) link
okay I just dl'd this stupid app, it is a lot more like an entire social network than i thought
― iatee, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:02 (twelve years ago) link
being a preteen today seems really bleak
nothing a lil adderall wont fix
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:11 (twelve years ago) link
http://gigaom.com/2012/04/09/here-is-why-did-facebook-bought-instagram/
Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects. Why? Because Facebook is essentially about photos, and Instagram had found and attacked Facebook’s achilles heel — mobile photo sharing.
― Johnny Fever, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:38 (twelve years ago) link
Basically, instagram has its mobile platform down pat and fb, even though its usable on mobile devices, is not MADE FOR mobile devices. Zuck just bought the infrastructure to remedy that.
― Johnny Fever, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:40 (twelve years ago) link
I doubt that the infrastructure the 12 people at instagram built is better than whatever mobile shit fb is working on
― iatee, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:42 (twelve years ago) link
hahaha
― markers, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:43 (twelve years ago) link
does that mean I can share something on fb from my phone? cuz that would be worth $1b
― diamanda ram dass (Edward III), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:43 (twelve years ago) link
achilles heel for lunch, zuck
― buzza, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 01:46 (twelve years ago) link
'does that mean I can share something on fb from my phone? cuz that would be worth $1b'
you can do that already
'I doubt that the infrastructure the 12 people at instagram built is better than whatever mobile shit fb is working on'
the infrastructure probably not; the app, yes. instagram is one of the best UX experiences I've ever seen for a mobile app. incredibly easy to use.
still, yeah, no revenue and no apparent plan for revenue. I don't blame them for selling. fb bought it because it could afford to and was scared that instagram getting 500 mil in funding last week meant that it was on the verge of doing something bigger that was going to be a threat. in this sense, this makes fb start to look like a monopoly, or microsoft or some shit.
― akm, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 06:46 (twelve years ago) link
big props to instagram for negotiating their way into 1 BILL-ION DOLLARS
― swaghand (dayo), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 11:37 (twelve years ago) link
how?! I've used the fb mobile app on a couple diff phones and there's never a share button next to links and posts, just like and comment
this info is worth at least $500m to me
― diamanda ram dass (Edward III), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 13:18 (twelve years ago) link
― iatee, Monday, April 9, 2012 9:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
nah theres a good chance it is, just by virtue of the fact that facebook has been in existence as a website for nearly a decade now and has only lately been trying to build a mobile platform on top of that (and doing a bad job), whereas instagram is built *for* mobile. building platforms that work seamlessly with all the same features between desktop and mobile is pretty hard, and probably even harder on a site like facebook where you have both a large company and a massive user base. twitter is the only company i can think of that actually pulls it off.
― max, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 13:45 (twelve years ago) link
idk I figured they prob have people working on something from scratch
― iatee, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 13:54 (twelve years ago) link
I don't know anything about coding but when fb was created in 2004 or w/e, not sure the zuck anticipated it growing to include half the western world, from what I've heard fb has had problems scaling up their database infrastructure et cetera, hard to do when the world counts on you to be have an uptime of 100%, you can't just take it down for a week to transfer everything into the sleek new scaleable database your $500000/yr programmer bro just designed
― swaghand (dayo), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 13:57 (twelve years ago) link
yeah but you can't just say 'okay let's dl all of fb onto this awesome instagram platform' either
like, mobile is pretty clearly the future of the $100 billion company, surely there was something in the works
― iatee, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:00 (twelve years ago) link
not sure the zuck anticipated it growing to include half the western world
yeah...he anticipated it growing to include the entire western world
― iatee, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:01 (twelve years ago) link
I think facebook has some good devops people and software engineers, but I'm not sure if they've got everything pointed in the right direction! I know that several years ago their general direction was to work on creating a backend that would optimize the hell out of their existing codebase and give them the ability to continue working in the same languages while letting the site perform. Whether they've retooled, I have no idea.
Instagram is all amazon/s3/cloud-deployed, right? I think you gain a lot from starting from that approach in that if you do it right you are concentrating on scaling and the ability to dynamically add resources from the start.
― mh, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:05 (twelve years ago) link
yeah but they could start from that approach w/o dropping a billion dollars
― iatee, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:06 (twelve years ago) link
There's no way facebook or anyone else would have to actually take down a system to transfer to a new one, though. Might be some hiccups across regions and some weirdness with notifications, but I doubt we'd tell the difference since that happens anyway.
― mh, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:07 (twelve years ago) link
I think for them to do it they would have had to create a separate facebook iphone photo app, then people would get confused
― swaghand (dayo), Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:07 (twelve years ago) link
if you're talking about infrastructure (databases for account authentication, user profiles, image storage) then that is the same for mobile or web.
client/app/mobile web interface is entirely separate from that.
― akm, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:08 (twelve years ago) link
xp No, certainly, buying Instagram is more about buying the user base and the whole package. A team of good engineers could create their own Instagram, but no one is going to jump over to a duplicate product.
dayo, facebook has their own Messages app, though! I see no real issue with multiple facebook apps.
― mh, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:08 (twelve years ago) link
akm otm, although I think that facebook's website doesn't actually call their APIs, public or external, and that's one of their big issues.
― mh, Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:09 (twelve years ago) link