

Exposed: Facebook’s Secret iPhone Photo Sharing App (Which Looks Amazing) - ericflo
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/facebook-secret-photos-app/

======
Luyt
I now see how it all fits together. Through inside information, Color found
out about Facebooks new photo sharing app, which will render them obsolete.
The board decided to transform Color into a patent troll, to leverage at least
something. Peter Pham disagreed with this direction, and left Color.

------
tuhin
Curious: Was this a planned leak? If not, then how difficult is it for
Facebook to identify exactly whose albums are these?

Also as a side note, for a company like Facebook with apparently not outsiders
(like suppliers etc) who have info on the plans of the company, how do these
leaks happen? Employees?

~~~
jrnkntl
I think these are mock-ups, so no albums are visible that can be tied to a
specific person.

~~~
whereareyou
A guy who works for Facebook is tagged in the center photo.
<http://www.facebook.com/beau>

~~~
splendid
hah. I went to school with Beau, he was a complete douchebag. Much more than
usual for a french immersion student.

------
suneliot
i'm surprised it's taken facebook this long to create something photo
specific. photos are one of the top (if not THE top) reason why people use
facebook.

------
shawnwall
This has an uncanny similarity to Color, even that custom tab bar has the same
exact icon placement. To me this looks more like a new version of Color with
tight facebook integration... or perhaps FB got Color to to the dev for this
while they are floundering right now.

I also find it odd that FB would spin out a separate app when all along
they've been going for a unified experience in the iPhone app.

------
Creyels
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/troubled-startup-color-
lose...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/troubled-startup-color-loses-
cofounder-peter-pham/)

~~~
zengr
And they raised $41M!!

------
zengr
The death of Color, Path and Instagram?

~~~
yuvadam
Absolutely.

Facebook's behemoth social graph will easily steamroll over any new effort in
this space. Color/Path/Instagram will need some insane differentiation in
order to win this battle.

~~~
chrischen
What advantage would Facebook have apart from being able to cut off API access
to competitors?

~~~
spatulon
You can't tag people on Facebook in a photo uploaded from Instagram, or at
least I never found a way. Facebook's own photo app will be a first-class
citizen in that regard.

~~~
slig
The API is there, see "tags"
<http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/photo/>

------
PStamatiou
Please don't add filters..

~~~
sthulbourn
But they could add 4 free filters and then charge you tier one pricing to
unlock more via IAP and then get sued by Lodsys. I don't see how this could
fail :)

------
pwpwp
what exactly looks amazing about this?

------
MatthewPhillips
I hope they don't spin this into a separate app. I suppose it was developed by
another team (Beluga guys?) but I'd take the time to merge the code base with
Facebook iOS proper.

------
sayemm
I'm not surprised at all. Here's my comment on a previous HN thread a few
months ago related to Color: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367621>

If you're building any kind of social app you'd be a fool not to think about
the possibilities of the big players integrating your features into their
platform, and what your long-term gameplan is going to be.

------
Tycho
FB could be sitting on a goldmine with all these photos. _Could be._

As computers get faster and software more sophisticated, we might see things
like automatic manipulation of photos to change the branding on peoples
clothing (in a fun, opt-out sort of way preferebly). Or detecting the brands
that people wear then selling aggregation of that data to market researchers
(bit easier and more likely).

------
mortenjorck
There may be some similarities to Color and Instagram, but perhaps the most
uncanny is to Cooliris LiveShare: <http://www.cooliris.com/liveshare>

------
error
just another photo app for iphone, but much needed for FB as it depends on
photos.

------
j_baker
To me, there's a bigger story here: techcrunch has something good to say about
Facebook.

------
Lennie
html5 ftw, sorry had to mention it :-)

------
innes
Is it just me or do photos not look awful on facebook? They're compressed to
death.

~~~
xelfer
They recently added the high quality upload option, I'm guessing most people
just want the faster upload and use the compressed versions.

~~~
kristiandupont
But unless they have some clever client-side compression, upload wont be
faster..

~~~
johnthedebs
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they do. Haven't used it in a while, but
IIRC it's a java applet and is one of the clunkiest parts of the site for that
reason.

------
mariusmg
These days the word "amazing" is used way to easily.

