Introducing Facebook Camera

http://newsroom.fb.com/News/Introducing-Facebook-Camera-170.aspx

by sahillavingia • 14 years ago

143 130 14 years ago

newsroom.fb.com

nthitz• 14 years ago

This reminds me of a certain other mobile camera app that FB acquired quite recently...

splatzone• 14 years ago

INSTAGRAM, YOU SAY?

zecho3• 14 years ago

I've said it in this thread already, but that acquisition is definitely not finalized.

borski• 14 years ago

I realize this was probably in the works for a long time, but is it crazy to think that the Instagram folks helped build this?

Perhaps filters are coming soon. :)

simondlr2• 14 years ago

There are filters + ability to crop and rotate it seems.

hornokplease2• 14 years ago

Looks like filters are already baked-in.

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."

tommi• 14 years ago

Yes it is. See "Expect a 6 month freeze on Facebook’s Instagram acquisition" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3965961

hornokplease2• 14 years ago

From another article on Facebook Camera:

"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...

JCB_K3• 14 years ago

It seems like this is made by the team formerly known as Sofa. Both the person who posted it and the name in the screenshot used to work there.

gfosco• 14 years ago

More ad-free mobile experiences from bubblebook... This ought to generate so much value. /roll

duaneb2• 14 years ago

The userbase is almost always more valuable than immediate monetization.

JCB_K3• 14 years ago

I really don't see the point of separate apps. The main Facebook app, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Photos...what's next?

Anyone who can enlighten me why this would be a good strategy? Seems like unnecessary fragmentation to me.

jdcryans• 14 years ago

My experience with their app is that it's just so slow that being able to jump directly to Messenger when I need to use it saves me some time. I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing.

JCB_K3• 14 years ago

Making a separate app is not a solution. Speeding up your main app is.

simondlr2• 14 years ago

When taking photos, Facebook wants it to be the first thing users think of. By stripping other separate features, users won't be that easily confused about the purpose of the app. I'd venture and say few users immediately go to the current Facebook to upload a photo, but if there is a separate app, then the other features won't distract them from what they want to achieve. Basically: "Want to share a moment? Think Facebook. NOT twitter. NOT instagram."

That's my guess.

timjahn3• 14 years ago

For photos specifically, it takes me an average of 10 minutes to upload a photo on their iPhone app if I'm on my cell connection. The 10 minutes consists of a combination of upload attempts, fails, freezes, etc. It's just a horrible experience.

If this new standalone photo app will let me easily, quickly, flawlessly upload photos to Facebook, then hell yeah.

pinko• 14 years ago

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why not just fix the main app?

wattjustin• 14 years ago

I agree, at this point, my iPhone needs a new folder created specifically created for Facebook produced apps. I already have too many camera apps installed, many of which upload to Facebook.

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.

54mf• 14 years ago

They want to own the mobile ecosystem. After they release enough Facebook _____ apps, they can (a) lean on the OS makers to give them preferential treatment, ala Twitter in iOS, and/or (b) release a Facebook phone with "all the apps you already know and love".

salman89• 14 years ago

Facebook always had photo sharing features built into their apps, but was still dominated by Instagram. Lesson here is that mobile apps are very task oriented - people have apps to check their email, get directions, etc. Having function specific apps for Facebook makes sense here.

mycodebreaks• 14 years ago

Next is Facebook Ads.

dominostars• 14 years ago

It's the iOS paradigm to make feature simple standalone apps. Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contacts" app?

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.

freehunter3• 14 years ago

It's somewhat in following with the Unix paradigm; do one thing, do it well.

niketdesai2• 14 years ago

This.

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.

RandallBrown• 14 years ago

but what's weird is that the Facebook app also does both of these things already, just not quite as well. It's especially weird with Messenger because I think both apps can get push notifications.

bookwormAT• 14 years ago

We call the unix paradigm now the iOS paradigm?

Timothee2• 14 years ago

"Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contacts" app?"

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.

newhouseb• 14 years ago

When you try to design a mobile app you quickly realize how little real-estate you have on a phone to build a complex interface. Facebook is a ridiculously complex app when you think about all of the things you can do.

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.

zecho3• 14 years ago

> 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.

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

In part, for the same reason (in part) that Instagram blew up. iOS doesn't have Android's intent feature.

Drbble• 14 years ago

Billion dollars for cloning one instance of a feature of android. So much for the "apps sell, not features" theory

cdcarter• 14 years ago

I like it. There's less wading through non-native in-app menus. I want to read my timeline or generally waste time? Facebook. I want to send a quick message to someone I don't text? Facebook Messenger. I want to share a new photo or three from my friend's commencement? Facebook Photos.

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.

tsurantino• 14 years ago

Can the point of separate apps be justified in reinforcing that Facebook is more of a platform than just a website?

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.

adrianhoward• 14 years ago

Anyone who can enlighten me why this would be a good strategy? Seems like unnecessary fragmentation to me.

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.

MasterScrat• 14 years ago

Less click. Instead of Facebook -> Camera -> whatever you directly access the feature you want.

smokinjoe• 14 years ago

Because it ropes in people like me who don't want the native Facebook app on their phone, but want to keep in touch with friends who use Facebook messages.

habitatforus• 14 years ago

Because Facebook wants to be the platform and not the app. At some point we'll realize that Zuckerburg was out to replace Windows not Myspace

sparknlaunch122• 14 years ago

Agree with this statement. To compete with Microsoft, Apple, Google you need a platform (OS and phone). While Facebook messenger didn't really off, photos may be more of a popular transition as many send photos to Facebook anyway.

muhfuhkuh• 14 years ago

Icon space. Assuming most people don't put their related apps in folders, they instead have it all on display. Like shelf space at the grocery store. The more product users can see with your brand, the more they'll

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.

tar• 14 years ago

I think this might have something to do with the App Center they are launching soon. Making people install their own apps through the app center will make them more familiar with it.

ken• 14 years ago

If I were Facebook, I would be thrilled at the idea. I'd want as many apps as Facebook has features, as long as we could get users to install them.

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".

zmitri• 14 years ago

A guess: Facebook phone with separate facebook apps all built on android.

canthonytucci• 14 years ago

That was my first thought as well until I saw that the app was only iOS first....doesn't mean it wont happen, but I'm still not ready to bet on it.

joedev• 14 years ago

The same reason that one goes to "Camera" on an iPhone to take photos and goes to "Messages" on an iPhone to send messages. They do different things and it's clear when you open the app what you want to do. And though you can take photos from within Messages and can SMS photos from within Camera, it keeps things simple to have a clear intention for each app.

eric-hu• 14 years ago

I had the Facebook app for Android before they split it into 3. The version just before the split was unstable for uploading photos. It was consistently crashing whenever I tried to upload a photo.

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.

baby3• 14 years ago

I actually asked myself this question several times until I recently found an answer.

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!

taude• 14 years ago

I think it makes sense to have two apps for FB. One's for content creation, and optimized for that. The other's for when you're bored and killing time scanning through the stream. When I'm sitting somewhere and I see something I want to share, it makes sense to just use the app that's optimized for posting a photo

uptown• 14 years ago

Reminds me of when Yahoo Photos was competing with Flickr.

sahaskatta• 14 years ago

Google did something similar too. They had "Google Videos" which competed with "YouTube" for a very long time.

drewwwwww• 14 years ago

this app is clearly worth a billion dollars.

sev• 14 years ago

Since this app seems to directly "compete" with the Instagram app, I wonder if their goal is to get rid of Instagram completely.

slantyyz• 14 years ago

I've always thought that the goal was to slowly let Instagram die in the same way Flickr has.

derrida• 14 years ago

Flickr is dead? News to me, I've been using it today to search for creative commons images. Software is much broader than what you and your friends use. :-)

duaneb2• 14 years ago

I just assumed it was instagram people, and the two products would eventually become one.

zecho3• 14 years ago

No. The FTC is probing the purchase, which was to close 2nd Quarter this year, so it'll delay that. That said, it's still very possible the two will eventually become one.

patrickod2• 14 years ago

They split Camera and Messenger out into their own separate applications recently on Android. This was quickly reverted seemingly due to really bad reception. It puzzles me why they're repeating this

Kylekramer• 14 years ago

The problem with the Android version is you got three apps in your app drawer when installing the main Facebook app. That was confusing, spammy, and impossible for the user to opt out of if they wanted to use Facebook on Android at all. A separate app is just confusing (unless you are coming from Facebook's perspective), so it is an improvement. I am positive there will be a separate Android app in the coming weeks.

patrickod2• 14 years ago

"A separate app is just confusing" Is this not a new separate app on iOS? I realise it's not installed alongside the Facebook and Messenger app as it was on Android but it's still separate of the main application.

jen_h• 14 years ago

The Android shortcut was really confusing - a guy at our local watering hole last week was showing me his favorite Android apps, then pointed out an app he installed because his camera app broke. "It just stopped working last week, but I installed this app and use it instead, it works. Don't know what happened to my camera."

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?

raimondious• 14 years ago

Note the author is Dirk Stoop, of recently acquired Sofa. (Congrats Dirk if you're reading.)

briansugar• 14 years ago

is this run on a windows box??

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flyt• 14 years ago

Facebook's press site is operated by NASDAQ.

creativityhurts• 14 years ago

Why is it available just for the US App Store?

koeselitz• 14 years ago

I'm in the US, and it doesn't look like it's available yet. I'm just searching the App Store on my iPhone, though; I'm not sure if things show up there later or something.

smackfu4• 14 years ago

Usually stuff is released first in New Zealand app store, so maybe they wanted to do US first, and others will be available later.

nivertech• 14 years ago

Rebranded Instagram with Feacebook photos integration?

mstefanko• 14 years ago

So confused. I understand the instagram deal is on hold, but a separate app for facebook photos, even if it's been in the works for awhile, seems like a waste of time. It's a deterrent from what should be their main focus. When investors are skeptical about the future of their revenue/stock, this would be the last thing I'd want to see. If this was built into the facebook app, as an improvement, that be cool. LNo one would care about it, but it would at least make sense.

kurtvarner• 14 years ago

Bad news for Batch from Dailybooth (YC S09). They focus on uploading photos in batches.

http://batch.com/

maybird• 14 years ago

I see this as an inflection point for them. Pivot or die. Hopefully they'll do the former, and reach new heights.

gkoberger• 14 years ago

The just pivoted less than a year ago from DailyBooth to Batch.

(The team is awesome, though, so I'm not worried about them.)

Greg12x• 14 years ago

Wow. Do we really need this?

templaedhel• 14 years ago

UX bug that is actually fairly glaring when it comes down to 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.

iaskwhy• 14 years ago

It was on the Featured page on the App Store for me.

smackfu4• 14 years ago

It worked for me from the SMS (although the App Store crashed the first time but that is on Apple). Maybe it's fixed.

ja272• 14 years ago

I just Googled the iTunes link and followed it on my iPhone. Opens the app in the store even though it can't be found by searching yet. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/facebook-camera/id525898024?l...

dylanvee• 14 years ago

How interesting: I installed and launched the app expecting to see the standard "Log in with Facebook" screen, but instead there's a big button that says "Continue as [my name]" (and a smaller one, "Not you?"). I wonder how exactly they're doing this, and if it will make its way into 3rd-party apps. It made the first launch experience quite seamless.

vl• 14 years ago

On iPhone you can share secrets between apps by the same developer if there are signed in the same way, there is no easy way to do it across apps.

mlinsey• 14 years ago

This is fantastic. I hope Facebook continues with the break-apps-up strategy, because it makes a lot more sense for mobile. On mobile, you have less screen real estate, a less precise pointing device (fat fingers vs. a mouse), and you're generally shorter on time, especially compared to when you're wasting time on Facebook on your laptop. All these things mean that simpler apps with fewer UI elements and with a single clear purpose are much better on mobile. I already use Messeger alone as much as the actual Facebook app, which is disastrously unwieldy. Here's hoping we see events and contacts as the next apps. Games is also probably a big priority.

mkr-hn• 14 years ago

The style reminds me a lot of Google+. It's good that they're willing to accept design inspiration from outside Facebook.

alexpenny• 14 years ago

A lot of the people working on the app were from Sofa.

tga• 14 years ago

The Zowieso reference in the screenshots is a nice hint to that, it was (is?) the Sofa company cat.

tferris3• 14 years ago

There're pros and cons.

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.

rwc• 14 years ago

Isn't the point here that instead of creating hardware and developing the software on top of it, Facebook is creating its own mobile offering in reverse? Building all of the software and setting the hardware component as priority two.

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.

sriramk• 14 years ago

How does the app know who I am without asking me to log into Facebook? Is it guessing somehow from my FB app's login + UUID? Or am I missing something basic

nupark2• 14 years ago

Just a guess, but the iOS keychain can be used to share information across applications with a common bundle prefix.

ja272• 14 years ago

It's weird because their other apps open a URL to authenticate within the main Facebook app. This is a bit cleaner.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/DOCUMENTATION/ToolsLa...

bishnu• 14 years ago

I don't have the Facebook app on my iPhone (I used to but I deleted it) yet Camera still dumped me into my FB account with no login. Odd.

justhw• 14 years ago

What's with the generic name camera. Good luck ranking for the term.

psylence519• 14 years ago

Why rank when you can just shove it in the user's face with your other app? Just like they did with Messenger.

smackfu4• 14 years ago

Two thoughts:

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!

aguynamedrich• 14 years ago

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/19/facebook-is-secretly-buildi...

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.

sparknlaunch122• 14 years ago

Agree the comments supporting Facebook's fragmented strategy of introducing new separate apps.

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.

cletus• 14 years ago

I said earlier today [1] that mobile proposes a strategic risk to Facebook as they don't control the mobile platform like Apple or Google.

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-...

baby3• 14 years ago

This!

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.

Z3UX• 14 years ago

Then just buy an Windows Phone! There you can combine Facebook + Twitter + LinkedIn + you name it ;)

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

I must admit, this looks great. There seems to be a couple of design choices that are a bit weird that have been mentioned below, but it's a solid bit of work.

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.

EricDeb• 14 years ago

How does this compare with instagram? (I have yet to upgrade to a smart phone)

I wonder if FB could have simply released this as a direct competitor to instagram and crowded them out versus shelling out $1B.

pixelphantom• 14 years ago

We're still using Facebook?

wluu• 14 years ago

My initial impressions upon launch was that it seemed to load much faster and was more responsive than their main iOS app.

arihant• 14 years ago

I followed the link from Google to app store. It gives "This request could not be completed" error on the app store. Maybe I'd have to wait.

I would also love an FB contacts app.

neilparikh• 14 years ago

This looks a lot like Instagram to me.

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.

gagabity• 14 years ago

So no Android version? Plus there seems to already be an unrelated App named Facebook Camera in the Android Market, it should get a nice little downloads boost.

Introducing Facebook Camera

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