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Facebook Releases Instagram Clone, Two Months After Acquisition
redletterdave writes "Six days after the company's IPO and two months after it acquired photo-sharing app company Instagram for $1 billion, Facebook debuted a photo app of its own on Thursday, called Facebook Camera. The app is now available as a free download in the App Store, and it's currently only available for iPhone and iPod Touch owners. Facebook Camera is set up very similarly to Instagram and includes most of the same features (including photo filters), but Dirk Stoop, Facebook's product manager for photos, said Facebook was working on this application long before the Instagram acquisition on April 9."
It seems that Facebook not only have taken Bill's money, but also followed his footsteps in dealing with competition.
Actually I don't even care anymore. I don't use FB that frueqently, and slowly migrating away to G+ for geeky stuff. For rest I have email :)
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Just how bubbly was it for Facebook to spend $1 billion on Instagram? Whether they wanted to destroy competition or whatever they wanted to do, this just makes no sense at all. I am sure people at Facebook know stuff that the general public doesn't, but this just seems like a ridiculous way to do business.
They (FB) must have felt it was cheaper to buy the whole company then to litigate about stupid patents and copy rights.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Read that as "We shackled our own workers to the desk, but none of them could figure out how to make something that could share and filter images like that so we kept giving those geniuses offers until they buckled. They also got kinda pissed after the 8-or-9th offer and started throwing goldfish, tomatoes, and smelly socks at us, but our combination bodyguard/repo-men dealt with that little threat in a Facebook Timeline minute."
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
This Social network fad is done. Yoked of innovation, on the path to mediocrity and disdain.
"and it's currently only available for iPhone and iPod Touch owners". Right. This was part of the FB app update for the droid 2 weeks ago. I got so confused when I first read this story yesterday because I knew I'd had it for awhile.
I'm sorry, but this just shows how fast FB is going to tank. A billion dollars for something that they were already developing.......clever. Obviously someone felt that this was a threat to the "release" of their own version, planned right after IPO (coincidence.....lol). So there ya have it, now we'll see if investors catch on, that FB is being managed like a circus.
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.
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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), 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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
... they spent a billion dollars on something they already had.
They discovered a billion dollars worth of junk that doesn't work on all platforms.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
He is neither an idiot nor a savant. He is a prop.... hoodie and all. He has a budget of X million a year to make himself loud and stay in the news. He may have blown that budget with instagram though. He is about as much a CEO as rappers are gangsters.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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.
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.