Why Twitter's New Photo Service Is Not The End Of The World For Instagram

As expected, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced Twitter's new photo uploading and sharing service today at the WSJ's D9 conference.

You can read more about it here, or check out Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's blog post about it here. (It's Dorsey's first post for the Twitter blog since 2008, if we're not mistaken.)

Today's announcement is bad news for simple Twitter photo-hosting services like TwitPic and Yfrog, which have not done much to differentiate themselves, and won't likely be the default photo sharing service for any official Twitter apps in the future.

Their usage will probably sink or flatten as Twitter's new service, powered by Photobucket, rolls out.

But this isn't the end of the world for Instagram, another popular (and fast-growing) mobile photos service.

Instagram has differentiated itself very well, through features -- like its photo filters and ability to share photos with many services at a time, like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr -- and its community and social elements.

Instagram seems well on its way to becoming a powerful mobile social network of its own, based on photography. Flickr for the future, basically. And a plain-vanilla Twitter photo uploading service just doesn't seem like much of a threat to that. If anything, once more people get used to the idea of sharing photos on Twitter, they might even consider Instagram an "upgrade," boosting its growth.

Today, we wouldn't want to be stakeholders in TwitPic or Yfrog. But Instagram seems like it can still be a big success.

Related: How To Use Your iPhone On Vacation (The Right Way!)

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Why Twitter's New Photo Service Is Not The End Of The World For Instagram

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Why Instagram Can Become The Mobile Social Hub

100 Cameras in 1

Why Instagram Can Become The Mobile Social Hub

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AOL Launches Play, An "Instagram For Music," On Android (AOL, GOOG, AAPL)

AOL's mobile efforts so far have been to make mobile apps and websites for its existing properties, like AIM, Mapquest, Engadget, etc.

No longer: The company is launching its first "mobile-first" product today.

It's called Play, and it's an app for listening to music and sharing it with friends.

David Temkin, AOL's VP of Mobile, describes it as a sort-of "Instagram for music." (Instagram is a popular, fun, social photo sharing app on the iPhone.)

Play lets you listen to music from your phone, and also stream song samples from Rdio, using a new API. If you are a paying Rdio subscriber, you can listen to full tracks. And you can share music with your friends using the service, or also via Facebook and Twitter. (A little like Apple's Ping service, but AOL doesn't really want you to think of this and Ping in the same ballpark. We don't blame them.)

Play is launching today exclusively on Google Android phones because of a sponsorship with T-Mobile. Temkin says it will ship for the iPhone within a month, and will include sponsorship and advertising support in the future.

Read: Apple's Amazing iPad Business In Context

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AOL Launches Play, An "Instagram For Music," On Android (AOL, GOOG, AAPL)

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Flickr Should Have Built Instagram. But They Didn’t. Here’s Why.

Back in June, we reported on the departure of Kellan Elliott-McCrea from Yahoo. While not hugely known outside the developer community, we had received several tips indicating just how important Elliott-McCrea was to the Flickr team, where his role as "Architect" was supposedly "vital" to the service. So who better to answer questions about Flickr than Elliott-McCrea (who is now the VP of Engineering for Etsy), right? And that's exactly what he's done on Quora. Specifically, someone asked the question: Why did Flickr miss the mobile photo opportunity that Instagram and picplz are pursuing? The mobile photo space is red-hot right now with several players beyond the two mentioned vying to become a common app on smartphones. And one of them, Instagram, was able to gain over a million users in less than three months. So why wasn't Flickr, with all the resources of Yahoo behind them, able to dominate this space first?

Flickr Should Have Built Instagram. But They Didn’t. Here’s Why.

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Why Did Flickr Miss Out On The Mobile Opportunity Instagram Is Winning? (YHOO)

Innovator's dilemma, e.g. in order to compete with Twitpic we would have had to be willing to sacrafice our own login system in favor of Twitter's (insecure) one. The Yahoo! Paranoids would have shut us down in a heart beat (See also: http://laughingmeme.org/2009/07/...)


Additionally we fell into the trap of thinking like an incumbent, we spent 6 months off and on talking to Twitter about preferred product placement rather then just shipping the integration we had built.



We also spent *years* debating whether or not to build iPhone apps/iPhone optimized sites or bet on a HTML5/multi-device strategy. And work like the award winning iPhone optimized Flickr mobile site was viewed ambivalently even within the team as it happened largely as a skunk works and was very much hard coded around iPhone's limitations.



Lastly, Marco Boerries was the without a doubt one of the most viciously political, and disliked Yahoo! execs and he reigned for 4 years over the Yahoo "Connected Life" team which had universal control over all native mobile experiences within Yahoo.  Several Flickr internal attempts to build and ship native mobile experiences (going back to 2006) were squashed relentlessly.   The Flickr iPhone app that eventually shipped was built by CL.



That said it's easy to look at the successful products and wonder how **anyone** could have missed something so obvious, but the debate about what the future of mobile photography and photo sharing looked like was a fairly active one. Perhaps less remembered the innovated Radar.net social/mobile photo app/site was very visibly struggling to gain traction throughout this whole time period, and many less interesting attempts never made it to the gate.



Prototypes like Flickr for Busy People (http://flickrforbusypeople.appsp...) and the semi-integrated Photos Nearby (http://www.flickr.com/nearby) both built by Aaron Straup Cope, as well as the afore mentioned iPhone optimized http://m.flickr.com were partially byproducts of those long running internal debates about how to do mobile.



It would actually be incredibly straightforward to build something like an Instagram on top of Flickr using the API, especially if you could convince Flickr to release an API to "Beehive" the friend finder tool, which among other things, benefits from Y! backdoor deal with Facebook.

This post originally appeared as an answer on Quora and is reprinted with permission here. Kellan Elliott-McCrea formerly worked at Flickr and is now a VP of engineering at Etsy.

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Why Did Flickr Miss Out On The Mobile Opportunity Instagram Is Winning? (YHOO)

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Here's Why Instagram Can Actually Be Huge

There's plenty of competition right now for startups who want to be the biggest mobile photo-sharing app, even though no one knows for sure if that's a real market or if this functionality will be taken over by Facebook or even Foursquare. You have companies like the heavily funded Picplz or Path, started by entrepreneurial stars and aimed at regular folks. But by far the "hottest" one has been Instagram.

Instagram lets you take pictures and then apply filters to them to make them like cool (?) retro photos.

To be honest, we really dislike Instagram. We think it makes every picture look like every other picture and we think faux 70s photos on iPhones is like something The Onion would invent to make fun of Brooklyn hipsters.

But we do have one datapoint that suggest the company might actually have hit upon something big. The problem with retro filters on photos is that even though it can be fun to play around, it seems to appeal only to a limited demographic of young, urban types who like this sort of stuff. And yet something happened that's making us think it could go mainstream.

Yesterday night I had a good friend over for dinner. Among other things I showed him my iPad. After checking out a few apps, he said "Oh, wait! Do you have that app that makes photos like polaroids?"

"Huh? Wait... You mean Instagram?"

"Yes! Yes!"

He'd never used the app but he'd heard of it. I showed it to him and he instagrammed everything. Me, my coffee table, my walls, my books. Had a blast with it.

And keep in mind this friend is, sure, a young urban male, but he's a total non-techie -- he's an actor. And he lives in France, not New York or San Francisco. He's not on Twitter, never logs on Facebook, and has only the vaguest idea what Foursquare is. He qualifies as a Normal.

This small datapoint is telling us two things. First of all, Instagram is truly going "viral", in the true sense of the world: people who are using it are talking about it to people who are not, who want to check it out. That's the best form of marketing there is, and it's the kind of momentum that's often very hard to break. Second of all, Normals who do use Instagram often end up hooked, at least judging by a first enthusiastic 5 minute session.

So yes, even though it pains us a little to say so, Instagram looks like it could be huge one day.

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Here's Why Instagram Can Actually Be Huge

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