Instagram talks a good game, but I find this to be more unimaginative dreck. Look, I get it, you need to clone Vine to stay competitive, but it's not new or a re-imagining of the video paradigm.
Most of these social startups promise unique experiences based on new forms of social interaction, but really only deliver more ways to watch cats dance on the internet.
Bring on the hardcore technology like better Ethernet Switching, Less Apps please.
Since you brought it up, there are great things happening in the Ethernet Switching space, just nothing that makes it to the front page of a site like Hacker News. I'm an engineer at Arista Networks, where I get to work on some really impressive "hardcode" technologies: ridiculously scalable protocols, very distributed systems, really interesting uptime/redundancy requirements, and much more.
However, let's not start idolizing the networking field so quickly. This in an industry with a lot of entrenched interests, which, like in all B2B businesses, leads to a lot of FUD being spread around and glacier-paced rates for adopting new technologies. There's plenty that I envy about the consumer app space.
In any case, if you guys are interested in learning more about some of the hard technical problems being tackled in the networking space, I'd be happy to do a couple of writeups exploring the non-consumer world of tech. (And, if that stuff tickles your fancy, we're hiring!)
Not sure why people think this is about FB running ads.
I highly doubt FB would consider pre-rolling an ad on a 15 second clip. Youtube is the king of pre-rolls... they probably have a min length requirement before they will insert a pre-roll.
I agree with this. This is a clever way of soon rolling video ads on your Facebook timeline. Audio could be disabled by default and the experience would feel less intrusive.
Systrom specifically said that videos will post natively to the timeline.
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Q: Will videos post natively, on FB Timeline?
A: Yes. You’ll be able to see videos right in your timeline.
Just another recycled, cloned feature from an existing application. Consumers simply don't care about "hardcore technology" - Ethernet switching? That's like telling a consumer that Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet - they'll look at you and say "Facebook is the Internet."
I couldn't agree more with the "less app please" statement - but we live in a very skewed reality these days. Apps like Vine take off in weeks from people posting the dumbest, worst, lowest quality videos of their cats and themselves eating food. Instagram destroyed photography by making an 8MP smartphone camera <1MP with a square polaroid-like frame and the worst destructive filters of all-time. It's just a vicious cycle of bullshit. When will it end?
The state of technology, rather consumer technology, is indicative of the consumer - and unfortunately, the average consumer isn't very bright.
It doesn't make you dumb or a hipster or anything like that. It's simply how you like your photos - and there's nothing wrong with that.
As someone who has been involved with photography since the days of 35mm film and someone who has developed their own B&W in a lab - Instagram (and Vine) are regressions of the art. They utilize and encourage poor quality images, poor ratios, and poor choice in taste (cats and food pictures and people flexing in gyms).
But it DOES NOT matter - the consumer wants this, demands it, uses it, so it works. That's an entirely different problem than the photo/video quality issue.
If you look at a platform like 500px, you'll see immense quality - but again, doesn't matter, >90% of people are incapable of creating photos like that. So they don't some crapware to share their food. More power to them.
> As someone who has been involved with photography since the days of 35mm film and someone who has developed their own B&W in a lab - Instagram (and Vine) are regressions of the art.
What can we do to improve the default pictures taken with smartphone cameras? The picture you get with that tiny camera isn't very good, even now, though I think that Instagram is an improvement.
Not sure how you think a <1MP highly filtered IG photo is better than a 8MP+ smartphone camera photo. It isn't.
The "default" smartphone photos are leaps and bounds better than IG, the only thing that will "improve" them is higher res cameras, I'm sure the iPhone 5S will see an 18MP camera with better software. Just look at panorama - that's a serious achievement in smartphone cameras.
Sharing photos is a different question/issue all together.
500px is a perfect example of an application that takes advantage of high-quality images, whether taken with a dSLR or not.
Video stabilization has been around for ages. I personally don't find it anything disruptive or imaginative. Even on the iphone there are lots of app for video stabilization.
Look, I get it, you need to clone Vine to stay competitive, but it's not new or a re-imagining of the video paradigm.
Why does it have to be? And besides, by adding video, Instagram just put its boot on the throat of Vine. I already deleted Vine from my phone -- I went from seldom using it to having absolutely no need to use it.
Less Apps please.
They added video capability while maintaining the exact same user flow to take a photo. That's how you add a feature. It's a huge win for users.
I saw Kevin Systrom speak on a panel moderated by Kevin Rose where he said "Instagram is not a photo company, it's a communication company". While it might be a communication company someday, it very much is a photo/video company now and they should spout fewer pithy aphorisms and spend more time building kickass technology. IMHO.
Maybe this is me projecting, but I feel like it's way more difficult to create a good video than it is to create a good photograph. I see lots of great images on Instagram and a lot of terrible videos on Vine. I hope my Instagram feed doesn't fill up with terrible videos.
Good point. Instagram's killer feature was that it made amateur photographer's photos look better, but the answer for video can't be just apply filters again, right? Could it be transitions (like how Vine has hard cuts in and out now)?
This is not a "killer feature" - Apple already includes a Class in iOS for video stabilization (AVCaptureConnection Class). This is just regurgitated marketing crap, as usual.
The videos I've seen so far are kind of an artsy fartsy super-8 b-roll look. Doesn't seem any worse than the photos. Of course it depends on who you follow. Not necessarily looking forward to seeing video from my family members who mainly post screengrabs of motivational slogans or their dogs.
It used to be pretty natural for me to use this in product announcements (along with other catchy words: 'innovative', 'game-changing', 'amazing', etc...). "Why not, I think it's beautiful, so will everybody else!!"
My manager taught me that it was far, far better for my users to discover the beauty themselves. "Under promise, over deliver." Let the user get excited about the functionality - the most beautiful or easy to use products don't need to list 'beauty' as a feature.
Gone are the days of "It just works!" because, well, people expect that it will just work. All the major platforms, at their core, all work the same and all just work. The visual appearance is the differentiation now.
Today we are here to announce our new feature, it's called "Beautiful". Beautiful is the most...crap guys we didn't think through the naming of this feature very well.
So, expectedly, we will hear a lot of criticism that Instagram is copying Vine. In some ways, it is - but with its own spin and one that I think will emphasize beauty in video, much like it has done with photos and whereas I see Vine personally as one that lets you share moments as they are or some kind of quirky videos. Technologically, the difference is arbitrary (filters vs. no filters) but, as the saying goes: the medium is the message - and Instagram has created a community based on those filters - and that community will invariably transform the new technology into something extraordinary.
What I'm interested in is what will happen to Vine. Vine was meant to be this great sharing solution for moments recorded in video. It had its moment when it first launched, then dipped in popularity, and only recently started getting popular again. Its use has not skyrocketed (I could be wrong). My belief is that it's because taking a good video is hard, harder I think, than taking a good picture.
So, it's likely that Instagram will able to bullishly leverage its existing and talented user base to take full advantage of the video feature. What about the majority? I'm worried that most Instagram users won't use the feature as actively because they are too intimidated. I mean I looked at the cafe latte example and it was practically cinematic. Is the Average Joe expected to take a video like that?
I think this is the right step for Instagram but I'm not sure whether they've solved the essential problem in sharing these video moments.
Completely agree. I created a site that is a vine web viewer for shared vines on twitter. To date I've collected over 86 million shared vines and the majority of those are in the last month. It took the entire month of February to reach 1 million vines, today it ranges between 1-3 million a day. The introduction of the Android app really accelerated the growth and I suspect a slight lull will come up as the newness wears off.
IMHO, I think that is because no one uses the Vine app to consume vine content, so they must post to twitter to share their videos. However, with Instagram, I open up that app specifically to look at photos that people I follow in Instagram have shared.
My Instagram social network is largely independent of the other large ones (twitter, FB, G+) with only a slight overlap, so it definitely deserves its own consumption, and would also explain the reason that the vine shares are more prevalent on twitter than instagram shares.
I wonder how Vine will fight back. Will they now also include pictures ? ;)
Anyways, I feel I'm being played by all the media attention that this got. Since when an app update gets all this attention ? Are we getting so superficial that this stuff really gets so many spotlights ?
It's not even a new app or anything disruptive, it's just Vine on Instagram with edition mode.
Well the 'Cinema' feature is something brand new that Vine doesn't have -- stabilizing videos like this is mind boggling to me at least and should be interesting to see how it plays out.
Now the Play Store page is saying "CURRENT VERSION:
Varies with device"
I haven't seen that before. It's not letting me install it on my Galaxy Nexus as of yet. Is there a list of devices that the latest version of Instagram works on?
Edit 2:
Looking at Instagram in the Play Store app on my phone, the description is saying that it's supported on devices with Jellybean (4.1) and above. My Galaxy Nexus is rooted, and I'm running a custom ROM of 4.2.2.... but it is still not allowing me to install v4.0 of Instagram. Strange.
To be fair, it's really not like Instagram had never considered doing video up until Vine came out. Hell, I'm sure every high schooler had the idea of "Instagram for video"; it's a very accessible, logical progression from Instagram-style photos.
While this is true, you can't deny that what this article is showing is almost exactly what was innovative about Vine. The short, hold-to-film, no edit clips originated with Twitter's product.
That being said, I'm not excited about this update. I love Instagram, but mostly for it's simplicity; the number of vines on my Twitter feed worth watching is astonishingly low, and this will only produce, IMO, more content not worth watching.
Cinema stabilization. What utter bullshit. Apple created this class in the iOS SDK (AVCaptureConnection Class) that enables stabilization.
Do you think for a second that IG/FB devs sat there writing an image stabilization algorithm? No chance.
Instagram going video is the RIGHT MOVE for the product, 100% - but, it's just another regurgitated copy of another app, which was a copy of another app, and so goes the cycle of bullshit.
I think people are missing the point here if we're judging Instagram on the grounds of innovation alone. What's exciting about this is that Vine seems to be the only startup that got the formula of "Instagram for video" right, and now we're seeing them being surprise-attacked by a relatively unexpected competitor that has a far bigger user base and launches on Android and iOS at the same time. I don't even think there are that many people interested in crafting short video clips using these apps so I'm personally thrilled how Vine's going to thrive now that the ball's in their court. There's a lot to be learned from this developing story if you're an entrepreneur.
I don't mind that Instagram has video now, because that does seem logical for them to add. However, they really need to make videos separate from the pictures somehow. Either by having separate feeds for video content and the classic picture feed or a way to filter by type in the feed.
It is nice that there is an option for videos to not play automatically, but I would still rather just not see videos all together.
I can tell you now that there is going to be a lot of "unfollowing" in the near future with this new feature.
I'm not crazy about this. Will videos just automatically appear in my feed- and start playing? If they play with the volume up that's going to get irritating (and bandwidth heavy).
My reaction in general is the same as the tagging feature- I'd prefer it didn't have it, as I like Instagram as a service for almost taking abstract photos (landscapes, patterns) than of me and my friends on nights out. But I also realise that it is inevitable, what with them being owned by Facebook.
You've posted several times in this thread so far complaining about the ads, do you have a source? There aren't any video ads right now nor did they specify _anything_ about how they might work. The only thing they _did_ say, was that user content won't be used in ads.
"Based on how they were being positioned for the summer launch, video ads will appear to targeted users in their news feeds up to three times on the day they’re slotted and will begin silently playing when a user scrolls over them, according to source who heard Facebook’s pitch.
Audio won’t be activated unless a user clicks on the 15-second ad, at which point it will restart and spread over the right- and left-hand rails of the page."
Aside from the actual product announcement... I'm interested to see that they created an Android and iOS version at the same time. For the past several years, Android apps were typically pushed off a month (or years, in Instagram's case).
I wonder if their Android app drove much of their adoption in the past year or so, and as such, they decided to make sure they could launch feature-complete apps on both platforms on day one?
If so - will Android finally start getting apps on pace with iOS?
Personally I like the limited "editing" capabilities of vine, where you hold a button and "fill up" part of the 6 seconds of video. It creates some really interesting possibilities that this simply won't have.
This does have filters but I don't think that'll make up for it
Have you tried instagram's video feature yet? It totally has that same thing. Only with this you can undo your last shot, instead of re-starting if you mess up. Undo is an improvement on the formula, not a corruption.
Tried it this morning whilst waiting for my train to arrive.
#1: Wasn't obvious that you had to press and hold to record, and removing your finger from the record button pauses the recording.
#2: The app seems to crash a fair bit. And when it crashes, your video disappears. Basically, I finished recording, and was trying to select a location.
It'd be a better experience if videos that you haven't posted yet are saved somewhere (ie: camera roll) so you can post it later.
To be honest, video is not something I'm going to be doing a lot of. Maybe once or twice, here and there (if I even remember it's there).
When I'm sitting on the subway and bored, I love to flick through Instagram. Over the years, we got cinemagram and vine and they were fun but when zooming between stations they were so slow to load. Instagram, though, was pretty quick and offered me quite a bit to look at.
I worry that, with video, Instagram will now be slow to load. I can't set aside time for "Instagram surfing"; it was a fun distraction during otherwise boring times—check in with your friends while you are stuck somewhere else.
I like this. Vine is great but never had the same browsing experience as Instagram. I'd much rather scroll through Instagram than Vine. Now I have even more reason to do so.
Downloaded it, the interface actually feels very nice. I like the ability to remove the last recorded section from your video and that you can choose a cover image.
Seems like an improvement. Adding video to their app doesn't feel like a clone (though it is) but a logical extension and I am sure many people will be happy to use this. It's unfortunate that twitter still won't allow for previews of these items.
I know vine is not going anywhere but this puts them in a weird spot.
I'm curious about how this works in their existing API. Does it get dumped into the list of photos for an account, or is there a separate videos API coming?
I am willing to bet it already works with their existing API. If you check out their API docs you will see they include a "type:" attribute (which has just been image thus far).
They should have not sold to Facebook, they had cracked social on mobile. The introduction of video just proves this point even more, as they built out their feature stack over the years, they would have slowly made facebook less relevant. Instagram is seen as cool on mobile as facebook was cool on the desktop. If Zuckerburg had started instagram, he would not have sold it.
Vine ripoff, Vine clone, what poor Vine will do...
WTF? There was no innovation in Vine at all. In fact, its more like Vine made a clone of Instagram in the first place. Videos on Instagram is just a logical improvement, slow evolution of the service. Nobody complains that Facebook allows to upload videos, and that it's trying to clone youtube after all.
If they were able to achieve better performance than Vine on Android (said another way: if it's usable), then they could make headway in the Android market share. I hope that's the case, because I eventually uninstalled Vine on my Galaxy Nexus because performance was inconsistent... and usually terrible.
The update hasn't reached the server around me, so I can't verify - are the filters really just the photo filters but on video? If so, I'm massively disappointed - they have a whole new dimension of data and they're doing nothing with it!
Yes, video filters are hard. That makes them worth doing.
Anything from light trails, fading shadows, cross-frame colour effects to stuff I can't even imagine! The possibilities are greatly expanded, if you stop thinking of video as lots-of-images-one-after-another.
With the proliferation of video, I wonder if Facebook will eventually try and identify products in videos and let advertisers create video spots that merge clips of your friends videos into sponsored posts. Imagine watching a short clip of your friend drinking a Coke in a sponsored post.
It would be a better step for instagram if they would bring adding caption capability to android apps. They have this on ios and other apps use instagram as photo sharing social platform because of tags yet android developers has no such chance.
For some, not all, it will matter that Twitter will still not integrate this into their site/apps. Twitter owns Vine, so there is likely little or no incentive for them to also support Instagram.
After watching a few Instagram-filmed videos on the web, videos on Instagram are much lower quality than those taken with Vine, likely to compensate for the 2.5x-increased length.
Isn't that the real problem? You're a company that says "here's 15 seconds to convey some information". Yet, you aren't able to convey the information you wanted to (i.e the ad for your service) in 15 seconds. I think they missed a trick with this ad.
The world was sorely missing tiny videos with filters. I think Instagram+Facebook is a great example of colo-fucking-ssal waste of math and engineering talent.
Instagram talks a good game, but I find this to be more unimaginative dreck. Look, I get it, you need to clone Vine to stay competitive, but it's not new or a re-imagining of the video paradigm.
Most of these social startups promise unique experiences based on new forms of social interaction, but really only deliver more ways to watch cats dance on the internet.
Bring on the hardcore technology like better Ethernet Switching, Less Apps please.