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

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.

mh otm

'certainly, buying Instagram is more about buying the user base and the whole package.'

right. but its an exorbiant buy.

I work(ed) for KodakGallery until last week. We have a pretty cool event photo sharing app; plus a website and a whole product line. But we're tied to eastman kodak which means we're going down the toilet and up for sale. First bid? Shutterfly, who have worse products and a worse experience overall; but Shutterfuly ONLY wants to buy the membership base to cut down on their competitors and will kill the rest of the company. If they win the auction, they'll have gotten millions of users for 23 million. Bargain price. But compare that to this buy. 1 billion for a membership base? Really? FB is saying they will let instagram run as is and not interfere with it or force anything on the members; maybe because they would face a big backlash on it; but that is a LOT of money to buy something that you aren't going to 'do anything' to.

Yeah, I have no idea what the real goal is, and maybe there isn't a solid one. Zuckerberg seems kind of cool on the whole deal in media quotes, right? I kind of wonder if this was a consensus board pick or if there's something going on the business side of things.

Either that or they're real dicks and don't trust what their internal mobile app programmers say -- which may be the case, since at least one guy left because he was kind of bored -- and they're going to have some Instagram guys guide their mobile team.

Remember, you can have the best people working for you, but anyone you hire to give you direction will always be better. Or so management always seems to think.

well its a membership base and also a play to stop instagram from overtaking facebook

that to me seems to explain 90% of it

yeah. i mean i should be clear that $1 billion is ridiculous no matter which way you slice it unless instagram is just like an office filled with $2 billion and the 11 employees are all security guards or something

idk, that might be the lowest amount of money that facebook considers pulling out their pocketbook for

that's a good point, maybe zuckerberg just forgot all digits smaller than a billion

biking in to work today i really wished i had gotten a job in palo alto instead of going to grad school

in other words i am so not 'getting' this instagram thing

it's ok, I witnessed my high school friend who founded p1nterest getting grief from his family for not being a doctor a few months ago

lol @ "fbml". worst company

fbml wasn't a horrible idea but kind of betrays the fact they're still in a php or even coldfusion mentality

like seriously, guys, they created a php compiler and optimizer and shit, I think they're mentally ill

oh, sorry, it's a converter that changes php to c++ and it's called "hiphop"

shoot me

how well did you know mr.p1nt3r3st mh?

We both did science fair, went to the same magnet school for AP classes and the like, had a computer science class together. Sadly I knew only a bit about said website when he was in town and he was like "man, I don't know anyone else here and don't want to talk to the other speakers all day, let's chill over lunch"

so, not that well, but enough to shoot the shit I guess

I'm not even sure I believe this 100% but a lazy thought is that Facebook's brand has never been about cutting-edge technology, at least compared to Google...it was initially about game-changing usability and now it's really just about the fact that everyone you know is there. Most of their attempts to expand the feature set have met opposition or apathy. I know they do have some really clever people working for them and obv they have to juggle massive amounts of real-time data but idk I feel the tech aspects are probably not beyond the reach of a potential competitor.

that will probably always be the case with social networks tho

like facebook's goal is gonna be to institutionalize itself as much as possible but in the longer term it's still gonna be easier for 100m people to switch to new networks

the underlying technology has nothing to do w/this at all, fackbook has tons of dudes and tons of money they can code the shit out of whatever they want, of course there will always haxors sniping at their php or w/e online, they are im sure crying themselves to sleep on pillows stuffed w/million dollar bills

feel like 'facebook is about photos' or 'what people use facebook for is essentially photos' is wrong

oh, sorry, it's a converter that changes php to c++ and it's called "hiphop"

shoot me

hahaha, FB is the new AOL!

otoh i just looked at path (which i had never heard of) (lol old) and closed the website in rage because my options were 'watch the demo' and 'watch the trailer', so maybe i just don't understand that everyone in my generation is illiterate

its a simplification but it has been repeatedly proved that the thing people use facebook for the most is photos

if i go on facebook and send one important message and click through a gallery of 100 photos because i am bored i do not think that means i am getting 100x as much use out of photos

its a simplification but it has been repeatedly proved that the thing people use facebook for the most is photos

― lag∞n, Tuesday, April 10, 2012 11:35 AM

its even implied in the name "facebook"

there are lots of other ways to send one important message

1 weird tip