I am so not "getting" this Instagram thing / do you guys want to look at each others pictures?

how come instagram ate flickr's lunch?

(NB have never used the former, but use flickr on the reg)

flickr can't decide if it wants to be social or professional

also (I'm guessing) really bad iphone integration

yeah the flickr app is pretty terrible

lol flickr

wait a minute everybody, markers has an opinion about flickr

I never started a flickr account cause I realized putting my photos on the site just made me feel like a shitty photographer

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.

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

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

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.

I think flickr actually costs yahoo money because of the unlimited storage for pro accounts, idk

instagram prob largely own its success to the fact that its not a full featured app

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.

i actually pay real money to flickr yearly. does anyone do that with instagram?

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.

the pictures I take with it always look shitty so I don't use it

nah instagram had no revenue at all
xp

"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

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?

"We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all." - zuck

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.

youtube for $1.65b vs. instagram for $1b

okay I just dl'd this stupid app, it is a lot more like an entire social network than i thought

being a preteen today seems really bleak

nothing a lil adderall wont fix

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.

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.

I doubt that the infrastructure the 12 people at instagram built is better than whatever mobile shit fb is working on

hahaha

does that mean I can share something on fb from my phone? cuz that would be worth $1b

achilles heel for lunch, zuck

'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.

big props to instagram for negotiating their way into 1 BILL-ION DOLLARS

'does that mean I can share something on fb from my phone? cuz that would be worth $1b'

you can do that already

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

I doubt that the infrastructure the 12 people at instagram built is better than whatever mobile shit fb is working on

― 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.

idk I figured they prob have people working on something from scratch

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

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

not sure the zuck anticipated it growing to include half the western world

yeah...he anticipated it growing to include the entire western world

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.

yeah but they could start from that approach w/o dropping a billion dollars

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.

I think for them to do it they would have had to create a separate facebook iphone photo app, then people would get confused

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.

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.

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.

or *internal* I mean. I think they really do have sloppy direct-at-data store calls.

edward III, do you use fb mobile through the app or via their web interface on the phone?

'facebook's website doesn't actually call their APIs'

their apis are awful actually. have you tried to use them? their documentation is a fucking nightmare, they depricate things all the time and don't really tell you; they introduced and then killed this fbml thing in like 2 years. now the only fb apps I ever had to use and/or build don't work. I hate dealing with it.