Instagram - Billion Dollar phone app

[dcsang]

The quality of the photography is not the point of Instagram. Neither are the fake lomography filters. It's the fact that the photos you take are automatically uploaded and distributed to everyone you know, and are part of an ongoing converstation about the world. Or, about your cat.

As someone who's never used the application - who owns the copyright of the photos that are uploaded to Instagram?

cheers,
Dave

 

[BobYIL]

Facebook took investor money from their IPO and plunked it down on a photo app with zero revenues for $1 billion.

Fools and their money...

With a market worth of $98B they spent $1B.. Wait until mid-May when they start selling stock and watch where their worth will hit.
Even a modest $105B makes 500% profit over the investment of $1B 😉.. (Fools and their money heh?)

 

[andersju]

As someone who's never used the application - who owns the copyright of the photos that are uploaded to Instagram?

cheers,
Dave

http://instagr.am/legal/terms/

"Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the Instagram Services. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services."

The normal stuff.

I thought this was pretty funny/depressing though, under "Basic Terms":

"You may not post nude, partially nude, or sexually suggestive photos."

Because anything "sexually suggestive" or "partially nude" has no place in the life one shares with others, eh? What do those terms really mean, anyway? "partially nude [unless you happen to have a Y chromosome]"?

Thanks but no thanks.

 

[maddoc]

As someone who's never used the application - who owns the copyright of the photos that are uploaded to Instagram?

cheers,
Dave

"Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text ... photos ... or any other materials(collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the Instagram services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide limited license to, publicly perform, publicly display,reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels."

 

[nightfly]

Facebook's business is monetizing your data by selling it to advertisers ultimately.

The more of your data they own, they better.

They think that by buying Instagram they can get more of your data that they can sell.

Whether it's worth a billion dollars is really ultimately determined by how much an advertiser is willing to pay them to for access to you. This remains to be seen but any way they get more info about you, your likes and dislikes etc adds value.

I downloaded Instagram awhile back but never used it. Probably won't now because Facebook to me is just the Stasi with tacit user consent.

The only thing that scares me is more and more services that use a facebook log in to more easily correlate all the data they are gathering.

As a service Instagram looks fun and welll designed and I don't mind the fake analog-ness of it. To me it points out how digtial photos are ultimately a little sterile and need a bit of jazzing up to make them more visually compelling.

 

[apodeictic]

As I don't have an iPhone and I rarely, if ever, use my cell phone for any form of photography - this is sort of in the "meh" category. I understand all the kids love it and use it and that's great - it can probably create some really cool "art" but when everything starts looking like my dad's kodachrome slides from 1972 but knowing that the image was taken 5 minutes ago - it leaves me sort of cold...

Cheers,
dave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

 

[sevres_babylone]

As I don't have an iPhone and I rarely, if ever, use my cell phone for any form of photography - this is sort of in the "meh" category. I understand all the kids love it and use it and that's great - it can probably create some really cool "art" but when everything starts looking like my dad's kodachrome slides from 1972 but knowing that the image was taken 5 minutes ago - it leaves me sort of cold...

Cheers,
dave

Cold? But why, knowing that your dad was 40 years ahead of his time🙂

 

[dcsang]

Cold? But why, knowing that your dad was 40 years ahead of his time🙂

It doesn't make it "attractive" or "familiar" to me as apodeictic may suggest by linking to a definition. What it screams is "trend" and not "style".

There's a huge difference between the two but the lines have become blurred thanks to marketers and social media.

🙂

Cheers,
Dave

 

[nightfly]

Thanks for that. Learned a new word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

 

[igi]

I thought one prevailing idea here on RFF is that "if you can afford it, why not (buy it)?"

And now people are complaining that 1bn is excessive? LOL😀

 

[Jamie123]

Instagram is nowhere near worth $1 billion. It's marketing and doing something for the sake of doing it. there is no material value to Instagram, no revenues, no ROI. It's an internet bubble acquisition.

Even Facebook has paltry revenues compared to its installed user base most of whom react strongly when presented with data mining options. Use for "free" does not = revenues. Investors are paying $1 billion for an app!

It's not about whether or not Instagram itself will generate any revenue.They purchased one of the photography apps on the iPhone with an established user base. Call it marketing if you will but there is a LOT of value in marketing. I don't think it's so much about investing in order to gain a ROI as it is about just buying the competition that were better at something that facebook wanted to do themselves.
Instagram is probably not worth $1bn but they probably wouldn't have sold if Facebook didn't make an offer that was too good to refuse. As for internet bubble acquisitions, everyone's been saying that Facebook's overvalued for a long time and maybe it's a bubble but I just don't see it bursting anytime soon. And while it's true that Facebooks revenue is modest in relation to it's user base they still made $3.7bn in 2011 (according to Wikipedia) which isn't bad considering it's a company with only around 3000 employees (again, accordiing to Wikipedia).

 

[Sparrow]

It's a brave new world out there ...

 

[emayoh]

Flickr dropped this social ball so hard and booted it so far as to be heartbreaking. It had all the tech, it had the brand cred, it had the users and it had all the tech available -- maps, Yahoo! location data, engineers. But they sat on their hands, built the worst phone app they could, and focused on... what exactly? The Flickr head of that time dropped out -- thankfully -- and we'll see how the new guy Markus (with a mobile background) does playing catchup. I don't have high hopes, but...

In answer to the question of what the rise of Instagram mean to photography, there is some possible optimism:

1) It injects much-needed competition in the sphere of photo management on the Web/Mobile. More innovation, more money, means more smart people are out there thinking of new ways to share photographs. This is good. Even if you think Instagram is silly, the frictionless ways it has enabled photo-sharing will become required for other platforms. Even Flickr and 500px will have to improve. This is (probably) good.

2) The generally fun nature of Instagram may make candid street photography slightly more socially acceptable again over time. A photog snapping a scene with a rangefinder may align more closely in people's minds with someone snapping a fuzzy warm Instagram, instead of the image of a paparazzi with an SLR hell-bent on putting ugly photos of you on TMZ. Or, so I can hope. Smile for the camera!

3) Resurrection of the square format. I'm hoping the rise of Instagram will bring (cheap) square-format clip frames back at some point. Can't find those anywhere in the States!

Addendum: Instagram will also help FB's geo-tracking. Instagram really did a great job integrating with Foursquare for geo-tracking. I assume FB will eventually funnel that data directly into FB and shut out Foursquare. Hugely valuable for FB is the info of where you are. This will be another way to figure that out.

 

[Jamie123]

Let Facebook make money off of all the lemmings of this world. Not me. I am with the above poster who likened Facebook to the Stasi.

Sorry but likening Facebook to the Stasi is quite distasteful and shows an incredibly lack of historical awareness. When's the last time Facebook exectued anybody?

As for not joining Facebook, you're of course free to do that. I care much about my privacy but I still use Facebook. I just don't feel that I have to make every personal detail of my life public on Facebook. I don't post any pictures of myself there and I don't use 'status updates' to tell peple when I'm taking a crap. Does Facebook make money off me? I'm sure they do. But on the other hand I'm using Facebook for free. And while there are some downsides to using Facebook, for the most part it's been an improvement in my life.

As for Instagram, I never really got into that. I'm just not much of a sharer. Never cared for twitter either.

 

[nightfly]

^^

Smart analysis. Flickr really did drop the ball. It looks pretty much exactly the same as it did when I started with them years ago. They were THE photo sharing community and blew it.

I think you are spot on about geo-tracking also.

I really don't see how any of us can value Instagram as an independent entity, Facebook is basically betting on the additional data gathering to add to their already impressive store of data. Instagram is worth far more to Facebook than it would be to virtually anyone else.

 

[nightfly]

When was the last time anyone used a metaphor to indicate one to one verisimilitude?

Just as Juliette is not actually the sun, Facebook is not actually the Stasi. It's merely a purposefully overwrought literary trope meant to point out how they gather data without most of their users awareness.

Sorry but likening Facebook to the Stasi is quite distasteful and shows an incredibly lack of historical awareness. When's the last time Facebook exectued anybody?.

 

[Jamie123]

When was the last time anyone used a metaphor to indicate one to one verisimilitude?

Just as Juliette is not actually the sun, Facebook is not actually the Stasi. It's merely a purposefully overwrought literary trope meant to point out how they gather data without most of their users awareness.

Firstly, it was a simile, not a metaphor. At least get your tropes right.
Secondly, I'm quite aware of the point you were trying to make about privacy. But using such a far fetched analogy really trivializes the actual doings of the Stasi.

And even if we leave good taste out for a second it's still a ridiculous thing to say. Facebook is not the Stasi. But they aren't Mother Theresa either.
I think most people are quite aware that Facebook uses their data in some way to generate revenue. They don't always know exactly how but they do know that it's happening. The truth is they mostly don't care.

 

[filmfan]

Firstly, it was a simile, not a metaphor. At least get your tropes right.
Secondly, I'm quite aware of the point you were trying to make about privacy. But using such a far fetched analogy really trivializes the actual doings of the Stasi.

And even if we leave good taste out for a second it's still a ridiculous thing to say. Facebook is not the Stasi. But they aren't Mother Theresa either.
I think most people are quite aware that Facebook uses their data in some way to generate revenue. They don't always know exactly how but they do know that it's happening. The truth is they mostly don't care.

Well said.

 

[nightfly]

Metaphor is the overarching term for figures of speech using a comparison of one thing to another. Simile is just a type of metaphor which explicitly uses as or like. So all similes are metaphors although all metaphors aren't similes. In any case it's a trivial distinction.

As it relates to the discussion, Facebook's data gathering goes far beyond what users knowingly provide as content since their Facebook login id can be used to track people beyond Facebook. The Instagram purchase is an effort to further this reach without explicitly needing someone to be "on" Facebook.

The data collection becomes more secretive and nefarious than what most people generally assume is happening. I agree that most people don't care either way but it is this type of data collection that makes the purchase of Instagram much more valuable to Facebook than it would be to another company that doesn't relie on user data as their product, which is essentially what Facebook's business model is, selling user data to advertisers.

Firstly, it was a simile, not a metaphor. At least get your tropes right.

 

[Jamie123]

Metaphor is the overarching term for figures of speech using a comparison of one thing to another. Simile is just a type of metaphor which explicitly uses as or like. So all similes are metaphors although all metaphors aren't similes. In any case it's a trivial distinction.

As it relates to the discussion, Facebook's data gathering goes far beyond what users knowingly provide as content since their Facebook login id can be used to track people beyond Facebook. The Instagram purchase is an effort to further this reach without explicitly needing someone to be "on" Facebook.

The data collection becomes more secretive and nefarious than what most people generally assume is happening. I agree that most people don't care either way but it is this type of data collection that makes the purchase of Instagram much more valuable to Facebook than it would be to another company that doesn't relie on user data as their product, which is essentially what Facebook's business model is, selling user data to advertisers.

Sorry, but you're wrong. Metaphors and similes are two different types of figures of speech. A simile is not a metaphor and a metaphor is not a simile.
But yeah, trivial distinction.

It is true that Facebook was caught tracking users activities even after they leave the page but as far as I know they got into quite a bit of trouble for that. I'm not sure if Facebook really sells user data or if they just use the data in order to show specific advertising to specific people. I think officially it's just the latter.
Why I still keep seeing the advert for 'tantric massage' in my town is beyond me.