Facebook Camera App

Image courtesy of Techcrunch.com

There are but a few positives to spin out of Facebook's release of the Camera app. It's no Instagram and the consensus around the web seems to be that Instagram is to Facebook what YouTube is to Google Video: Most users will stick to the service that has a focus on one area and does it best.

The all-photo newsfeed on the app is a quick way to see your friends' pictures at a glance. All photos, even those added to Facebook through Instagram are displayed in the camera app's newsfeed. But unlike the Instagram newsfeed, a lot of these pictures are uninteresting and dull.

Instagram strives on the notion that most people have a little artist in them. Instagram exploits this theory by making it easier to express the artist's eye. While Facebook is a dumping ground for photo collections, Instagram lends to a subtler, more expressive one off and a creative expression.

I had this conversation over twitter with a friend when she joined Instagram (late). Her inclination was to update tons of pictures of an event. I said: "Instagram aint Twitter, just take one photo of the cute Australian guys and leave it at that".  I believe that Instagram is meant for users to pick one photo and make it as nice as possible for display. Her response to my complaint: "If you don't like all my updates in your newsfeed, follow more people." But that's not Instagram's mandate. I'll follow people doing interesting things as I do on Twitter, but I'm content with the small community I follow and actually hope to catch most of what they post. I prefer to have a relationship with most of the people I follow on Instagram and keep that community smaller and more intimate, never bombarding or being bombarded by tons of updates (of the Australians my friend digs so much).

All in all, a few positives to the Camera app include the all-photo newsfeed (even better if more of your friends take better photos or use Instagram). Also the ability to upload multiple photos from your mobile device is a plus. However as I haven't tried it I imagine the wait time is intense.

All in all I'm not sure it matters what Facebook does to create a better experience for their Camera app, I don't believe it will be widely adopted.

Perhaps some the reasoning behind the $1Billion purchase of Instagram was to avoid the negativity undoubtedly expressed when releasing a copy-cat app, but my hope was that Facebook was planning to develop the Instagram experience further, not divide users between apps.

- Jon