Facebook Camera: Initial Internet impressions
The Internet has spoken.
Many Instagram users express confusion and disappointment following Thursday’s release of Facebook Camera for iPhone just weeks after the social networking giant acquired Instagram.
Nowhere are these sentiments more pronounced than in the Twittersphere.
A fake Mark Zuckerberg tweeted, “Excited to announce Facebook Camera (because it makes total sense to launch a competitor to a service we paid a billion dollars for).”
Retweeted more than 3,000 times, the tweet represents many users’ confusion.
“It seems a little redundant,” Syracuse University junior Lizzie Kelner said. “[But] not everything Facebook does ends up being a huge success.”
Kelner, who has been uploading mobile photos to Facebook using Instagram to document what she calls her YOLO summer bucket list, said she would consider using it given its editing capabilities.
Facebook Camera, which can be downloaded for free from the App Store, allows users to see a feed of just friends’ photos, share multiple photos without having to post one at a time and edit photos with tools such as cropping and filtering, according to Facebook’s press release.
The “only real draw” to Camera is the bulk-uploading feature, said Kelner, adding that it can be annoying to have to upload photos individually.
Facebook Camera’s 14 filters are also more sensibly named with titles that describe how they change photos, such as Bright, Emerald and Copper, rather than Instagram’s less indicative Hudson, Sutro and Brannan, according to TechCrunch. Nonetheless, Instagram has more filters, plus light adjustment and tilt-shift that Facebook’s new app lack.
“The emphasis is on storytelling,” Dirk Stoop, Facebook’s product manager for photos, told USA TODAY.
Yet ironically, the storytelling has occurred mainly on Twitter.
While a few praised the sleekness of the new app, many Twitter users said they were generally unimpressed and thought the app was useless.
With two other Facebook apps, Messenger and Pages, Facebook users are wondering why these need to be separate apps in the first place.
“Rather than trying to create a clone of an existing product, Facebook should focus on how to bring its core strengths -- namely the size of its network and app developer base -- to its existing products,” according to Mashable.
What do you think? Will Facebook Camera ever compete with Instagram or even the up-and-coming Trendyful app?
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Sonia Su is a Summer 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.Follow her on Twitter at @SoniaSu_
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.