
Introducing Photos of You - talhof8
http://blog.instagram.com/post/49445004952/photosofyou
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tyre
Tagging. They introduced tagging people in photos. Let's not make this out to
be some crazy feature, it should be a core part of a photo-based social
network.

As a non-user, I was a bit shocked that they didn't already have this feature.

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AVTizzle
Nobody's making this out to be a crazy feature...

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prezjordan
The title made me think there was some sort of face detection at work and I
could see photos where I happen to be in the background by chance. I
immediately had a moral debate in my head about this, before realizing it's
just a tagging feature.

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Aardwolf
Is it possible for someone to explain to a rarely-social-network-site-user
what Instagram actually does?

All I know is it has something to do with photos.

But you already can upload photos to various social network sites (and could
already upload photos way before this whole so called social thing existed).

And marketing talk saying how great photos are (which I think people knew 100
years ago too already) doesn't really help understanding it :)

So, what does it do? :)

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jonathanjaeger
It's super fast to take pictures. You don't have to use a filter, but if you
do, you can make an average or below-average picture look halfway decent (or
even amazing). There's very little friction to get started and it's easy to
follow and interact with people. Easier said than done to get such a great
experience on mobile. It's photos and social done right, in my opinion.
Anectdotally, it got someone like me who never took pictures before to really
enjoy the creativity and process of sharing photos with friends and have
memories of things I've seen in New York.

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Aardwolf
Are these filters better than what Photoshop/Gimp/... can do?

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andreigheorghe
Of course not, but you can't compare a desktop application like Photoshop to a
mobile app because the use cases are completely different. With Instagram you
can take the picture, select the filter, upload the photo and share to
Facebook, all within 10 seconds, at the beach. During that time, Photoshop is
still loading fonts and initializing action palette, on your computer at home
:).

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Kluny
Not to mention, loads of people don't have Photoshop, have never heard of
Gimp, and are scared to even try to get started learning either of them.

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twog
Instagram is now Facebook Lite.

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bluetidepro
This is a great update. It makes me think that it was also a big Facebook
business update that they have had. It obviously is just like Facebook
tagging, in that sense, so I could see how it was probably a huge feature
request to integrate it into their Instagram product.

I wonder if you start seeing some more Facebook media concepts transfer over
to the Instagram product. Stuff like creating albums, doing videos ( _to
compete with Vine, especially_ ), etc.

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evro
I don't like the direction they took with this feature. From the screenshots
it appears to place the tags on the photo itself, similar to how Facebook
currently handles tags. This assumes that Instagram photos will have people in
the photos. In my experience, this is often not the case and photos tend to be
places and things. I do like the concept of adding a "Photos of You" section
since I usually mention user handles in my caption. Prior to this feature, if
you mentioned a user, they would get a notification and the photo would
eventually get buried in your activity feed. Essentially this new section of
your profile organizes all those mentioned photos into one easy to find place.
I think they took an unnecessary extra step with the tagging IMHO

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akharris
I'm surprised no one is talking about the fact that this is a pretty clear
shot across twitter's bow. Users are trained to tag friends in instagram shots
using twitter handles, and to generate hashtags for locations and events. This
encourages users to move away from that dynamic - effectively removing a large
transmission mechanism for instagram via tweeting. Yes, you'll still tweet the
pic (maybe), but those in the pic won't be notified.

Very clever move to hurt a competitor while boosting internal engagement.

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kefs
Any tagged Photos of You are public, by default.. You can approve them first,
but you have to turn that option on. This sounds like a potential privacy
issue..

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bluetidepro
I don't think it's that big of a deal. When I launched the app after updating,
it had an on-boarding experience allowing me to choose either or option on how
the visibility worked. It wasn't like it was a silent "default on" option that
you're making it sound like. I actually think they rolled it out in a very
clean, and privacy thoughtful way. Probably because of the whole privacy
fiasco that had a while back.

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imjk
All these naysayers about Facebook's malicious intentions in here, but I think
this is actually a very intuitive feature for Instagram that a lot of users
thought should have been a part of the app from the start. I'd be surprised if
this weren't a feature that Instragram founders always intended to rollout. I
don't think this is necessarily the beginning of Instagram's demise through
Facebook's corruption of the app.

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rjd
Anyone have an idea what the usage stats for instagram are these days?

I've seen a massive drop off on Facebook. It's gone from my news feed more or
less just being instragram pics... almsot everyone using it... down to about 3
regular people. It feels to me like everyone I know has stopped using it,
unless Facebook is deliberately hiding pics.

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xpose2000
I read at a tech blog (can't find source now) that active monthly user counts
are as follows:

Twitter: 200 mil Instagram: 100 mil LinkedIn: 160 mil Facebook: 1.1b

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mikeg8
was that a tweet from dustin curtis?
<https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/329697840869814273>

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tcdowney
Wow this is some pretty cutting edge stuff.

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JoeKM
Awesome. This is incredible. I have dreamed about this feature. This is the
disruptive technology we need. I'm certain my 97 year old grandmother will be
using Instagram now. More social. Cutting edge. Invest now people.

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fumar
Facebookification of Instagram, and it brings a neat feature. It makes
Instagram more social... Now I can see my mom using Instagram.

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imjk
This is one of those features that I always thought Instagram should have.

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GuiA
Clever move.

Next one is merging Facebook accounts and Instagram accounts; and then boom,
they have a clean dataset ready to merge into Facebook.

Instagram can finally be a full part of Facebook, and the Instagram that we
know (and, for some of us, love) will be finally completely gone.

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talhof8
Agree. Totally agree. I think a good move for Facebook would be to keep
Instagram a stand-alone dataset and app.

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hashmymustache
What would be the point of acquiring them then? I guess to own social networks
like detergents - present an illusion of choice with separately branded
products under the same parent company.

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xpose2000
Because instagram is growing insanely fast. faster than facebook did at the
same age of the company. facebook could own both of the biggest social
networks out there.

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OGC
> facebook could own the biggest social networks out there.

ftfy. if they know what they are doing, they'll just merge the data into one
network, and keep the user experience on the frontends the same.

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jpadilla_
Instagram's user profile page seems to be broken right now

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ghettoeinstein
ooo oooo ___Niche Alert_ * run a contest insta-scam, and woefully have people
tag your spam page for free airline passes, or gucci bags.

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dcaranda
internet == selfies

