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Comment by uptown | Hacker News Reader

I believe Facebook looked at what part of their platform drives the most engagement by its users, and then looked at the big players in the market that are competing. If you look at the graphic in this post:

http://blog.1000memories.com/94-number-of-photos-ever-taken-...

...you've got Facebook, then Flickr (which is arguably a dead man walking) as long as it's under the Yahoo! umbrella, then Instagram. If they look were to compare the growth of their own photo platform from mobile, and compare it to the growth of Instagram on mobile, it probably helped them make the case to buy out the fastest growing mobile photo sharing platform before it became a threat, or before it became too expensive.

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before it became too expensive.

1b is not expensive yet? What is expensive then? Yahoo (10-15b)?

Frankly, this is as much confirmation as anyone should need that we are in fact in a massive financing bubble.

The sums of money being bandied about are absolutely mind boggling. 1 billion for a photo sharing app?

Billions for a pre-revenue video sharing site (YouTube)? Tens of billions for a social network (Facebook)? Remember that Yahoo! turned down Google for around $3 billion back in the day (before talks broke down with Facebook for even less).

I don't know how they got to the price and so cannot argue its rationality, but having one's eyes glaze over because of the price tag alone isn't reasonable either.

the NY Times is valued at 900 million.

just sayin'

The NY Times is also part of what is widely considered a sunset industry, even with its online properties. It's not implausible for companies in sunrise industries to become more valuable than the NY Times in the future, even if their revenue models are not yet clear.

print is a sunset industry. news is not. the ny times is about news, hence the apps and online deals they have.

and just in case you think that's not enough, it's more of a revenue model than instagram had.

"1b is not expensive yet?"

Well, let's assume FB gets somewhere near a 100b valuation when they go public. Is a tool that drives engagement, and ensures your users continue engaging with your site multiple times throughout the day worth a 1% investment not only to have it for yourself, but also to keep it from competitors? In one purchase, they've not only captured one of the leading mobile photography communities, but they've also purchased a tool that is used to seed those photos through other social networks. Now you'll have more "Facebook photos" appearing on to Twitter and Google Plus as long as users continue to use Instagram.

     Flickr (which is arguably a dead man walking)

Flickr is still the best and largest community of amateur photographers on the web. It's not shiny anymore and Yahoo is letting it stagnate, but the community is still there nonetheless.

What I don't get is that people already upload tons of shitty photos on Facebook. What Facebook misses here is quality of the uploaded content. The signal to noise ratio is awful. That's exactly what Flickr has and Instagram doesn't.

That's why I don't get this acquisition. What does Instagram have that Facebook doesn't?

My first thought was the native mobile app, which is indeed cool. But I never used it, simply because my Android phone came with built-in integration with Facebook and Google's Picassa, making sharing easy. And I also need a centralized repository of photos from multiple sources, not just from my phone, which means I need lots of storage and good management tools. And if I want to retouch my photos, I like to do that from the comfort of a laptop or a tablet, because the display of a phone is too tiny, even for playing around with stupid effects.

One thing that Instagram got right is giving you a sense of pride about your photos. You name it, you can apply a filter to make it more "yours", and the emphasis is on the single photo rather than a group of photos. Sure, there's more pictures of cappuccino art than I'm interested in on Instagram, but it's still better than albums where people upload blurry photos.

I've stuck with Flickr over the years though, and definitely agree that the community is still there. I've always liked how they report stats on my photos, and haven't found any other services that do that as nicely. I am worried about Flickr in the long term though, and am starting to think about other solutions for storing my photos.

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