Photo sharing is something that everyone is trying desperately to solve. When I open the G+ app on my iPhone it wants to upload all the new photos it can find on the phone. I would imagine the Facebook app does the same thing, but I don't know. The OS has cloud storage for photos baked in. When I plug the phone into my computer, Dropbox wants to automatically find and upload the photos.
Everyone is trying to get into this, and for good reason, I think.
My family is filled with people that always have access to a camera and to the internet via their phone. We're spread out geographically and don't get to see each other very often. There is a HUGE opportunity to bring us closer together that would be greatly valuable to us. I would love it if part of our daily routine included looking at all of the photos anyone in the family has taken in the last day.
There are lots of solutions for us to do this, but for whatever reason, nothing has taken hold. Maybe everything is too manual, or maybe social networks are still focused too much on the browser and not enough on mobile. But for whatever reason, it's not happening for us. I suspect we are not alone and I think the explosion of people trying to get me to buy into putting my photos on their free service is indicative of this.
> Photo sharing is something that everyone is trying desperately to solve.
Honestly - is this not a solved problem? I have a hard enough time choosing what service to use to share pictures on, there's not exactly a dearth of services in this space.
It's something everyone knows how to do from a technology standpoint, which is why so many services are trying to do it. But from a user experience standpoint I don't see anyone really nailing it. And I think for this you really want to nail it even for people who are not very good at all at using technology.
I think the problem stems from that no one actually have any pictures they want to share on a daily basis (exception might be pictures of babies). Instagram solved it by inventing shareable pictures of nothing.
While I can appreciate the idea of a "daily picture" (or whatever) in a more diary-form this is a completely different beast than a family photo / vacation photo / group activity photo etc., such photos only get better with time where an instagram is useless a social-minute after it was shot.
I've got the photos-that-get-better-with-time problem nailed, but I don't think it can be as viral as daily-nothing apps. Nostalgia tends to be more individual; daily-nothing is entirely social.
Found both of your comments here incredibly interesting. We're working on solving this problem with FamilyLeaf (YC W12): http://familyleaf.com
I'd love to have you try it out to help keep your family in touch, and maybe even talk further about your ideas around the problem. Please ping me at ajay[at]familyleaf.com
There is definitely a lot of social fatigue. I have cared less and less about my friends' hiking pictures over the years---and family and a few very close friends might be the largest group I will ever closely follow. It will be interesting to see what you guys come up with.
I still cannot send pictures of my daughters to my mother reliably (or more accurately, she cannot receive them). It's not solved by a long shot from my point of view.
Yeah - she has all the tech she needs. She's just really bad at using it. How do you share folders with someone who doesn't really understand even the basics of finder? It has to be automatic for me, and foolproof for her. If either element is missing, it doesn't happen.
To respond to the comments below/above: a digital frame w/ RSS may be a good option - I may try that. It still isn't perfect, but it's better than what I've been doing. (Emailing, and then having to explain over and over again what a "Downloads" folder is, and why you can't print images sized for the web).
Some complications that continue to annoy me, though: she wants to print them. She wants them on her ipad. She wants them on her iphone. I hate manually sorting out which ones she would like to see and uploading them to whatever service.
The holy grail for me? I take a picture with my DSLR, and it knows who to send it based on what I took a picture of. If it's for my mom, it appears on all of her devices, which have "print" buttons on them that will make nice, printed versions show up in her mailbox. I don't think this is that far off, but it doesn't exist yet in idiot-proof form.
Just get a digital photo frame that does rss, point it to your flickr account. She doesn't need to do anything, latest photos will show up on her frame
- FB for photos for my relatives/friends that have FB accounts
- Posterous/G+ for more personal photos (just neat stuff I take a picture of)
- Costco Photos for my parents-in-law
I guess that last one is the "unsolved problem" bit, but there are blocking logistical issues to even get them on the internet that may not get solved any time soon.
It's not necessarily that Instagram would become a viable competing alternative to Facebook on its own. Rather, it seems reasonable to imagine that Facebook would be concerned about the widespread adoption of third-party, cross-platform social infrastructure, as provided by Instagram.
Instagram, in providing a photo sharing experience (at least) on par with Facebook's, spanning multiple "social platforms", facilitates user migration across these platforms. In the current context, any user migration between social platforms would (almost) inevitably dilute Facebook's share of user-time.
Thus, it seems reasonable for Facebook to acquire this possible avenue of departure and generally maintain its current state while guiding future evolution of Instagram's product to subtly guide the flow of users along "Instagram Avenue" towards Facebook, rather than in its current unbiased direction.
Though useful from a business perspective, this sort of defensive acquisition is discouraging to me. I would prefer to see the evolution of "social" in general towards an open protocol for maintaining the actual user<->user graph structure and piping of information along it, with a loose confederation of services such as Instagram providing the content hosting/delivery. This would decentralize control of people's social graphs, with control being restricted to subsets of the shared content and its flow over the graph, rather than the actual graph structure itself. I.e. market-driven services such as Instagram would compete to control portions of the infrastructure implementing this new construction, which one might call the "world wide (social) web".
TLDR: Facebook's purchase of Instagram permits them to simultaneously reduce the instantaneous rate of user migration across social platforms while preventing the emergence of a competitive open social platform/protocol, the evolution of which would be greatly facilitated by the prior existence of third-party social content infrastructure such as Instagram, which reduces the size of the "chicken and egg" problem confronting any attempt at an open platform.
But that is how Facebook won the opening salvos of the ongoing social media competition. They had easy to use photo sharing wrapped in the veneer of social commenting so people could share photos and interact with each other (about the photos) easily. As an anecdote, this was the compelling reason most everyone I knew migrated from Xanga over to FB--they could share all their photos and interact with their friends in one spot.
Instagram took the whole photo sharing idea and ran with it to the next level to include multi-platform sharing and picture editing. Put a social wrapper of some sort around that, and you're back where FB was when it took off several years ago--exception being you have BETTER photos.
TL;DR Photos win the social networking game. Good photo sharing + easy to use social == winning formula, see FB's early years and reasons for adoption.
Moving photos from one service to another is doable, but it requires a LOT of effort from the average user (relatively speaking). Even if another company made an "import instagram photos to service X", the perceived effort of moving would prevent most users from finding such an import feature and making the move.
Photos are a pretty solid natural barrier that could protect Instagram while they made that long trek.
That being said, stickiness and perceived lock-in with photos doesn't make the trek any less arduous.
