Introducing Facebook Camera
newsroom.fb.com
newsroom.fb.com
Anyone who can enlighten me why this would be a good strategy? Seems like unnecessary fragmentation to me.
That's my guess.
If this new standalone photo app will let me easily, quickly, flawlessly upload photos to Facebook, then hell yeah.
I think they should fix it. But if their current solution is to make the photo taking/sharing a separate app, that's fine with me. I use Facebook mobile more to take/share photos than anything else on Facebook.
Ultimately I think it boils down to what you think of when you want to do take a photo or send a message which maps to (Facebook Camera, Facebook Messenger) more naturally than just Facebook.
It is hard to optimize for different tasks at once, while I'd also argue it would be possible to strike a good balance. But I think it is a pragmatic decision rather than try to achieve that perfect balance, and let several instagrams take over, do the right thing for each task and a year down the line knowing usage patterns, with much better hardware, you can think about a consolidated app.
I understand Facebook trying to keep users in their ecosystem, but separate apps for each part of their service seems a bit much to me as well and I don't see how it's a good long term strategy if they continue this cycle. We'll know they don't really have a strategy if they release an app solely for rejecting requests to play Words with Friends and Draw Something with others.
Many users upload photos to Facebook, so there's a huge incentive to make an app that makes it simple to do this. Even if the main Facebook app has feature parity with FBPhotos, it's still going to come with all of the cruft.
Chaining the utilities is the crux of the Unix paradigm, remove that and you're left with individual utilities that are far less powerful than when chained together.
On Android you can have any camera app | any photo editing/filters app | any social network upload where each app is chosen by the user which seems closer to the idea of pipes to me.
It isn't like intents on Android, but from the perspective of Facebook it is probably preferable. They don't want you to go to your choice of photo or social network or chat app, they want you to go to their app.
For those of you that don't use Android, the process works like this. You take a picture. The camera app provides a "share" button. You click "share". Then you're presented with a list of all applications that handle photos. So you can share to G+, or email a photo, or run it through filters, or whatever. The camera application never needs to know about the filter application (the reverse is also true). This makes it very easy to reuse code and for users to design their own workflows. Platforms don't really like this, since they don't have total control over the user experience, but for us users, it's pretty darn nice.
(You can also register URL handlers, so that something like clicking a link to Google Maps in your email automatically opens up the Google Maps app to the same state. Again, pretty useful.)
Basically, any iOS app can register a URL scheme and be opened with that scheme and anything after that by another app. This is used for example by Camera+: http://api.camerapl.us/app-api
With their API, another app can launch Camera+ to edit a photo and Camera+ sends the user back to the original app with the data of the edited photo.
Facebook uses it for single-sign-on of third-party app. (i.e. user taps "sign in with Facebook", the Facebook app is launched, the user taps "Accepts" and is redirected towards the original app)
One big limitation of this mechanism is that it's very much ad-hoc.
Another existing mechanism is the one where apps can register themselves as being able to handle a certain type of documents. You can then open a document from another app.
Two things people do that FB wants channeled through their systems: Photos & Chat.
Replacing your camera app with FBs means that all photos go to Facebook, which also represents the most important content on Facebook.
If your photos and your friends photos are all on FB then they go to FB.
If everyone you know is on FB then you'll probably use FB to talk to them. Thus, the chat ecosystem. Because FB is device and OS agnostic, it works even better than what Apple is trying to do with iMessage.
So why separate apps? Because people today already do these things as separate apps. You take a photo with your camera and then upload to FB. Now you just take a photo. This is actually what Google does with G+ and its automatic photo uploads. But FB can't do that, because they don't own the device ecosystem so this is their technique...for now.
I wonder if Apple will make them add "Facebook" to the app name to avoid confusion, since it's the exact same name currently.
Pros: -Pictures of their girlfriends naked
Cons: -A complete lack of relevance and editorial purview.
Every photo a user uploads to Facebook sends a message about who that person is. Out of about 300 photos I take on my iPhone, 1 makes it to Facebook. I have a few friends that upload lots of crap. For the most part, those friends had their feeds blocked by me fairly quick. These are not interchangeable events.
Facebook's biggest threat is a loss of meaning through noise, not users using an alternative app to capture their media.
As for Facebook Messenger, I'll be damned if I let Facebook permanently record every last one of my private message for eternity.
This is true of any data aggregator and visualizer. I'd argue they, probably next to Twitter, are the best at attempting to handle it within a social context.
I guess my thought about photos is incomplete in that making FB a storage for media means that your mean average of shared media will go up as well (it's already there, might as well). We see this in bulk uploads.
I agree that there is a certain amount of selectivity involved - but we vary as individuals. I think only in the last couple of years, after the fad of being able to toss everything online in heaps - have we begun to understood how our online perception is made.
"As for Facebook Messenger, I'll be damned if I let Facebook permanently record every last one of my private message for eternity."
Agreed. That's why I'm off it.
I'd say that in any case, they had to have Contacts and Photo Album apps for the iPod Touch and iPad.
Why also include them on the iPhone? Well, Photo Album has more features than the Camera app (access to Events, Faces…) so it might be simpler to have one codebase for a Photo Album app shared with iPod Touch and iPad, rather than trying to put all the features of Photo Album in the Camera app. For me, it's better too because it makes the Camera app more easily replaceable. (as seen with the OP)
For the Contacts app, I'm not entirely sure since it seems to be a clear subset of the Phone app.
Facebook might be working under the assumption that they can make cleaner, simpler products by breaking them out into smaller functional units all backed by the same social graph.
Or this could be a relic of something the Sofa team was working on before the Instagram deal.
Probably. And the Instagram deal is still under review from the FTC for quite some time, so it'll be awhile before we see any major integrations, I think.
One tap and I'm there, and ready to do what I want to do. Maybe two, if I have the app in a folder.
They also have Pages & Messenger. I like the idea of isolating these aspects because it gives more utility to these individual functions rather than obscuring them by combining all of the site's functionality into one, slow and poor performing app.
Overall, the app looks good but I'm not sure what's the deal with Instagram now.
Because they optimise a particular use case, which makes it more likely people will do something, which will make it more likely that facebook can use the shared content to drive more people towards facebook.
Take photo sharing. Photos are often spontaneous. So the more responsive, quick and simple it is to take a photo and share it the more likely it is to happen. Ideally I want to hit the photo app and by the time I've moved the camera up to my face be ready to take a photo. Facebook's new app is much closer to that experience than their current generic app. I bet that it will get more photos on Facebook. More photos == more traffic == more dollars.
You can't fix the current generic Facebook app to work as a better photo taking app - since if you made it the ideal photo taking application, it would be sub-optimal at the other things that facebook want the mobile app to do.
1) Trust the brand
2) Use it
I'm sure if they haven't integrated them yet, they will; and that in itself is a kind of lock-in you could only otherwise get if you owned the OS.
Right now "Facebook" is one app on iPhones and Androids, next to native apps like Camera and Photos. Imagine if Facebook was 10 or 15 apps, and they were the same across iOS and Android. For the Facebook-loving crowd, at least, they'd take up your entire home screen, and make the OS virtually irrelevant. For these people, it's more like anti-fragmentation (unification), on Facebook's platform.
I see this as similar to Netscape (built for a dozen platforms), or Office (for Mac): they're saying "don't worry about the OS -- we'll take care of that for you -- you only need to know that if Our Product is on top, then you know how to use it".
I'm not sure what was the source of the crash, but I can see how breaking up the Facebook application into smaller pieces would make it easier for devs to maintain well.
They want to compete with what's app and bbm. Facebook messenger is the SMS application of people who have internet on their phone. It's actually brilliant when you think about it!
I searched for "Facebook Camera" in the app store, but because it is so new, it is not there (ok, seems normal)
I went to the site and clicked "Text link to my phone", phone number already filled out, text went through fine (so far so good)
Clicked on the link, but facebooks mobile detection caught it before the redirect happened, didn't know how to handle the url, and redirected me to the facebook homepage instead (I was logged in, so this was my news feed page).
This leaves me with basically no way it install the app unless I wait for it to be indexed in the app store, or download to my computer, both of which I do not want to do.
This is really the best they can do to change that. I believe they're attempting to create a base mobile experience and use that as a selling point for mobile devices. On iOS for example there are standard apps for Mail, Maps, Search (browser), etc. I wouldn't be surprised if you see a suite of apps from Facebook to be the base functionality for some phone.
The next logical step would be to then bundle that on something and call it a Facebook Phone as a branding exercise. Carriers can bundle software, on non-IOS anyway, why not Facebook?
Mozilla ends money through the selling the default search engine on Firefox. Why can't Facebook do the same thing?
Part of this mobile strategy is to create a mobile platform (aka Project Spartan [2]).
Good for Facebook. At least they realize the risk they face.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4016950
[2]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/28/this-sure-looks-a-lot-like-...
My Android phone (HTC Desire) recently broke and I got a old iPhone 3G. One feature (among a lot of others) I really missed was being able to combine a contact with his facebook account. This feature could really make my next purchase be an android phone and not something else.
Turns out that the Facebook Camera shortcut just said "Camera" - and of course it didn't open up the stock camera app (I think it showed up on the main screen and first in the apps list, too). Once he updated Facebook and the shortcut disappeared, the stock camera app was more obvious.
The shortcut itself was really confusing - it said Camera on it and it wasn't immediately obvious that it was Facebook-specific. You want to take a picture, you look down & see "Camera," and you click on it. Combine that with the fact that icons change underneath you a lot anyway (see also "Android Market becomes Google Play Store"), and you just default to reading the app name anyway; so you tap to open the first app whose caption matches what you're looking for.
I mean, why would anything but your stock camera app be named "Camera," anyway?
But Facebook, why are you still cursing the world with your terrible main applications and spending precious development hours making additional apps? If you ever want to monetize mobile you need to make the mobile experience not terrible.
Take the team working on this, give them the main app, give them 3 months and let them go nuts. It'll work. It'll be great. Your users will want to engage more.
(The team is awesome, though, so I'm not worried about them.)
Facebook Messenger's new read/delivered functionality is much like BBM or iMessage. They just unveiled their app store. Now a Photos app.
Once the core apps are done and everybody who has an iOS or Android phone already uses them and enjoys them, convincing people to jump to an actual Facebook phone may not be a stretch.
Not saying that will ultimately happen, but it seems like this approach is keeping that door wide open.
This article is from nearly two years ago and claims that Facebook was very secretively working on its own mobile OS. If this is indeed the case, a lot of their somewhat recent acquisitions make a little more sense (GoWalla, Karma, Instagram obviously, and LightBox).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Faceboo...
The fact that their valuation gets beat down on the lack of ad revenue in the ever growing mobile space turns into a bullish signal if they release a high quality phone with a high profit margin. I wondered why they were splitting up their mobile app into many recently on Android as well, and this tells me that it's possible they want to create a suite of "necessity" apps as the basis for their platform.
Breaking apps up feels smart—it's like Unix. But otherwise you have more overhead, more apps and more updates. But I guess the app quality would heavily benefit because then the devs have to fulfill just one use case and by focussing on one thing the overall app quality might be better.
They could also introduce a system similar to web bookmarks: one app and many entry points—or like a command line app which does different things by adding options. Android widget often fill this gap offering different entry points into one app.
To compete with Microsoft, Apple, Google you need a platform (OS and phone). While Facebook messenger didn't really take off, photos may be more of a popular transition as many send photos to Facebook anyway.
I feel that the mobile app market will mature along the same lines as computer software. Eventually the majority of users will want a simple experience of picking up a phone without having to make choices in an 'store' environment.
1) This makes it even clearer that a lot of stuff that is allegedly tagged photos of people on Facebook is memes and "inspirational" posters. And you can only unsubscribe from photos in the web version.
2)You can't just change photos from 3:2 to square aspect ratio. The subject isn't always in the center of the photo!
You can upload pictures from here, there's a constant stream of photos, and you can apply effects to your pictures. There are a few differences from Instagram, but the essence seems the same to me.
I wonder if FB could have simply released this as a direct competitor to instagram and crowded them out versus shelling out $1B.
I would also love an FB contacts app.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/DOCUMENTATION/ToolsLa...
Perhaps filters are coming soon. :)
From the link: "It's also easy to edit photos with new tools like the ability to crop, rotate and add filters to any picture in your camera roll."
"Stoop confirmed to [All Things D] that Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and his team had nothing to do with building Facebook Camera."
Source: http://allthingsd.com/20120524/as-facebook-launches-a-standa...
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