Facebook Releases Instagram Clone, Two Months After Acquisition 138
redletterdave writes "Six days after the company's IPO and two months after it acquired photo-sharing app company Instagram for $1 billion, Facebook debuted a photo app of its own on Thursday, called Facebook Camera. The app is now available as a free download in the App Store, and it's currently only available for iPhone and iPod Touch owners. Facebook Camera is set up very similarly to Instagram and includes most of the same features (including photo filters), but Dirk Stoop, Facebook's product manager for photos, said Facebook was working on this application long before the Instagram acquisition on April 9."
Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Patents (Score:3, Insightful)
They (FB) must have felt it was cheaper to buy the whole company then to litigate about stupid patents and copy rights.
Um... so they reduced the field of potential litigants by one small company that hasn't been around long enough to build up much of a patent portfolio and doesn't have any particular history of litigating?
Re:Microsoft of social networking? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this represents an interesting dichotomy for geeks.
For instance, you might have the whole "going to dinner parties with the wife" thing in order to maintain a social norm. Meanwhile, you'd rather be in your garage tinkering with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino or something in your garage and making an anti-squirrel turret for your backyard.
As I'm getting older I'm realizing more and more that the hobbies I find intellectually satisfying are rarely something that can be plugged into a social component. As good (and intelligent) as my friends are, most of them wouldn't want to spend an afternoon learning something interesting in Perl or building a robot for the fuck of it. We go out for drinks or to a diner or something like that. I'm finding that I have to divorce "intellectually stimulating" from "social interaction" more and more every day.
No wonder we spend all of our time in the basement. It's the only place we can get any of the really interesting shit done, and almost no one wants to join us.
Re:Microsoft of social networking? (Score:2, Insightful)
Pick up a hobby that blends well with a social component. Homebrewing beer, for example.
No or few cultivated forms of social engagement (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, you might have the whole "going to dinner parties with the wife" thing in order to maintain a social norm. Meanwhile, you'd rather be in your garage tinkering with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino or something in your garage and making an anti-squirrel turret for your backyard.
As I'm getting older I'm realizing more and more that the hobbies I find intellectually satisfying are rarely something that can be plugged into a social component. As good (and intelligent) as my friends are, most of them wouldn't want to spend an afternoon learning something interesting in Perl or building a robot for the fuck of it. We go out for drinks or to a diner or something like that. I'm finding that I have to divorce "intellectually stimulating" from "social interaction" more and more every day.
-----------
When socialising becomes boring, just as you describe - I can relate to that, btw. - it's because today people rarely have any time or interest in cultivating social forms of engagement. It's still a relatively thin wholy educated layer of demografic that does these things, if at all.
If you want something stimulating to do that you do with other people it would be making music together, singing in a choir, staging a play or something like that.
4.5 years ago I discovered Tango dancing. And while I actually do have a diploma in performing arts and did that professionally in the 90ies (although not for a living really, you can't live off that), I never would have thought that I'd be doing that. I basically discovered Tango by accident, because a friend of mine asked me to come with her as her partner. Since then it's been like a drug. I go out 3 or more times a week at times and it only takes a little nudge to overcome the notion of just staying at my desk and doing a little programming or something.
Seriously, once you find a social activity that is stimulating beyond sitting together and chatting and getting slightly drunk, you're heading the right way. You can't dance while drunk, and you wouldn't want to, because you're having a ball (quite litterally at times :-) ) giving the ladies and girls a good time and improving your dancing skills. Just Tuesday I came back from Heidelberg with my feet hurting from dancing to much again. With a ladies/guy ratio like that (note the background) [ytimg.com], a mans gotta do what a mans gotta do, ... I guess. :-)))
Bottom line: Find a higher cultivated social activity than drinking and clubbing, such as the above mentioned, and going social won't be so one dimensional anymore. A few years ago it was Aikido for me, but since I've discovered Tango, I think I've found my contrast programm for the rest of my life.
My 2 cents.
Re:Stick a fork in it (Score:5, Insightful)
Email took off and stayed established because it was an open interface and anyone could set up a server.
No. Email took off because it was *useful*. Even closed source email tools such as Exchange have success for the same reason.
Facebook on the other hand is not useful. It may be fun (to each his own), addictive, a great time waster, but it's not essential. I've had friends - real friends - with whom I've exchanged messages way before FB even existed, through email, Fidonet before that, and *gasp* telephone and hamradio before that.
You can do without FB, and ultimately this will be FB's undoing: either people will move on to some other nonessential such service to get their kicks, or they'll waste their free time on something else if Zuckerberg tries a little too hard to squeeze money out of them.
Re:Stick a fork in it (Score:5, Insightful)
This Social network fad is done.
Except that's not remotely true. Facebook may fade away (eventually) but some form of social network or another will take its place. The internet has been one form of social network or another from the very beginning. I remember in the early days logging into a BBS waaaaay back in the day. What was that? It was basically the internet _and_ a social network in one. Then when I got the real thing, there were use groups and various forums. Again, social networks. And then came things like MySpace and social networks took on a whole new meaning. And MySpace faltered and faded and was replaced by Facebook. And odds are that Facebook will stumble at some point and be replaced by something else but social networks are not done. They've been here from the very beginning and they will be here when the entire internet is closed down and the lights get turned off.
Not a fad. Not done.
Re:Stick a fork in it (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook on the other hand is not useful.
Balls. Facebook is useful, it's just not *as useful or essential* as the media hype has made out.
It's great for keeping in touch with distant friends (and that is a valid form of friendship, despite what some people on /. seem to claim that friendships are a binary go-out-for-a-beer-or-you're-dead-to-me), organsing events/parties whatever, publicising trivial stuff, whatever.
It won't go away, but it probably won't change the world (any more).
Re:This is what happens (Score:4, Insightful)
They DID NOT buy it for $1 billion (Score:4, Insightful)
They bought it for mostly Facebook shares, which they CLAIMED were valued at $1billion. That was the whole point of that exercise, create a false third party confirmation of Facebook's share valuation!
It had nothing to do with Instagram's products or services, it was entirely about pumping a fake valuation of Facebook shares. A simply Pump-And-Dump.
It could have been ANY company prepared to cooperate in this that plausibly had a product with any product, overlapping or not.
man-kids (Score:5, Insightful)
4.5 years ago I discovered Tango dancing.
Wow.
That's one of the gayest things I've read in slashdot in a while.
Say what you want, this is the best venue for dating, a zillion times better than clubbing and getting hammered. Plus, on average, people engaged in trained dancing activities tend to have a higher level of education and income than the crowd engaged in clubbing and getting hammered. For me it was Salsa dancing. Dated a lot; have a lot fun; met more engineers that I could socialize with that way than at work; and where I met my wife.
Kids and man-kids will call it ghey. Men see it for what it is, a social activity.
Re:Stick a fork in it (Score:4, Insightful)
It's great for keeping in touch with distant friends
Unless you have "distant friends" you'd rather not have find you. I don't know about your history, but there are several people in mine I simply don't want showing up in my life. Hence, no FB.
No great loss....I don't consider someone who I once knew 25 years ago a "friend." In fact, FB has served to bastardize the word "friend" into something alien that isn't even close to the original definition. So sad.