Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Is Building A Standalone Camera App To Encourage Its 1.6 Billion Users To Share More (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Facebook engineers in London are working on a standalone camera app with a big live-streaming component. Similar to Snapchat, the app would open straight into a camera to foster immediate capturing and posting of photos and videos, as well as letting users stream via Facebook Live. With billions of smartphones in the world and near-ubiquitous high-speed data connections, Facebook sees a huge opportunity to get its 1.6 billion users sharing more than ever before. A camera app may help the company do that, and better compete with Snapchat at the same time. Facebook has recently rolled out a major live video update allowing anyone to post live streams of themselves to their timeline. Previously, only celebrities and public figures were allowed to use the feature. With this new Facebook Live update and standalone camera app reportedly in the works, the only thing holding Mark Zuckerberg back with his plan to triple the size of his social network is affordable internet.
I thought Instagram does the same thing.
So what does it do, automatically take a picture of dinner and quote a Beat poet based on the food items it identifies?
Facebook Hoped people will share more and do more of Facebook and the think Facebook is the web.
Reality is users are sharing less personal stuff, sharing more cat meme pictures, and realise there is a big world out there with REAL friends who LIKE doing stuff with you in real life.
Personally, I prefer the REAL friends I have, the ones I can borrow a car from, the ones who will go out drinking and bail you out the next morning. The ones who would walk over broken glass to be there with you in times of crisis, the ones who invite you round for a BBQ, laugh with you, laugh even harder at you.
I think the self-exposure trend is running its course. Even my more narcissistic FB contacts are posting fewer selfies in exotic locations and strange and unusual foods. FB is trying to keep it going, but nature takes its course and every fad will eventually go away.
I wonder what's next? Hopefully something less obnoxious.
Half the fun of Facebook is presenting yourself to your friends as a much cooler person than you actually are. How am I going to manage that when there's a live video feed showing them all my dorky self doing the talking?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The main reason *uckerberg is trying to push more and more video is that they can inject more and more ads into the video stream that are harder to avoid. Banner ads off to the side are just part of the background that you don't have to pay attention to if you don't want to.
Well, Zuckerborg is clearly motivated by greed and more greed. So, yes. On the other hand, I have had zero people so far ask me for my FB details. Maybe it was not that big a thing in Europe to begin with.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, facebook is a public company, as such shareholders need to be promised ever increasing returns.
Video streams seem like a nice overture to the tripple X business, eventually. After all, most of the FB users are adult anyway, right?
Just imagine the possibilities that can be opened.... and the reach... and the fans...
I will take screenshots of all those stupid FB memes and post them as original photos, just to piss them off.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
It's been a little while since I wrote mobile apps, but I seem to recall camera functions being freakin' easy to use. What are they "building" exactly ? These camera apps are the kind of thing a mobile noob can pump out in a day or two (speaking from experience). I mean, both iOS and Android APIs will happily encode to an MP4 file of your chosen quality, which you then read and upload wherever. Live streaming is less obvious, but well researched and documented... a simple copy-paste-tweak-run affair.
Or maybe the engineers are waiting for the Kardashian seal of approval :P
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Strange. Facebook has been making a move to bring most of these apps back into the main app. They've tried standalone apps and outside the Messager app they've failed. They previously released a standalone camera app and it saw very little adoption so it was pulled from the app store. It'd be strange to see them try this route again after having failed previously.
Yeah I hear you. I don't even understand why people don't all drive Fords...I mean...aren't all other cars really about the same thing? And why is there Pepsi, isn't Coke basically just the same thing?
I gave it a picture of Ted Cruz, and it came back with "Zodiac Killer." I think it works better than its creators ever knew it would!
You have to admit that a government which could track every citizen at all times through facial recognition software -- enabled by images uploaded to social media -- would provide a safer society. The power of information at work. Of course, there may be a cost; there's always a cost. I just don't think it's the 1984-inspired fantasy that most of its detractors seem to fear. And all I wanted was a Pepsi...
Yes, but you are pointing out products that are produced as competitors by different companies. This story is about a company with a strong product spending time and effort on another product that potentially competes with it (and thousands of other similar products, but never mind that!)
Why not lobby Google to improve the integration API and make it easier to use the native camera app inside other apps? Why does facebook have to duplicate functionality already present? I can only assume this will cause their app to become even more bloated. It's already at the beached-whale-about-to-explode point. Does everyone have unlimited memory for applications on their mobile device? I started bumping into the "Not enough memory to update this application" error years ago.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.