GigaOM » photo filters

Mobile apps for Google+ add photo filters, too

Eliza Kern — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:10:12 +0000

While Google+ might not exactly have reached viral adoption yet, the platform and layout have been popular among the photographer community, and on Monday mobile photographers will get some added features with the launch of updated apps, including photo filters and editing on iOS.

Within the last year, photo filters and editing have become very important for social networks on mobile, with Twitter attempting to challenge Instagram’s dominance by launching its own filters and editing app, and Yahoo pushing its revamped Flickr app around the same time. People just love sharing photos with their social networks, said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an event earlier this month, and the competition for photo-hosting has understandably increased.

Google+ said the editing features coming to the iOS app are from the team at Snapseed, which Google acquired back in September 2012. At the time of the acquisition my colleague Erica Ogg wrote why it was a message on Google’s part to Apple, which really liked Snapseed, and why it could ultimately benefit Google:

“So as amusing as it is, Google’s purchase of the company behind Snapseed, an Apple staff favorite, is not just Google trolling Apple. It’s several things. It’s Google understanding the necessity of offering high-quality photo editing within its overall ecosystem; aiming to improve its own current offerings like Picasa; and boosting the fast-growing photography community within Google+.”

Updates to the mobile apps on Monday also include a variety of tweaks and added features like the ability to share your location, improved ability to update communities on the go, and improvements to posts on the Android verison.

It’s not clear that photo editing and filters will necessarily give much of a boost to Google+ (I still don’t see many photos edited with Twitter’s photo filters showing up in my feed just yet), but it’s interesting to see the fruit of a social media acquisition for Google, as well as the future of Google+.

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Instagram hits major milestone of 100 million monthly active users

Eliza Kern — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:36:59 +0000

Instagram wants to be clear: it’s not losing users. The company announced Tuesday that it’s hit 100 million monthly active users, a figure intended to rebut claims it was harmed by a terms of service kerfluffle in December, and to show the app is still growing and building traction.

100 million monthly active users is a decent statistic that puts Instgram’s traffic at about half that of Twitter, which most recently announced 200 million monthly actives, and close to Google+ with 135 million (although neither comes close to Facebook’s behemoth 1 billion .)

Instagram wrote in a blog post Tuesday about the milestone, noting how far the company has come:

“For the first time, we understood why Instagram was going to be different. We understood the power of images to connect people to what was happening in the world around them. And, although Instagram had a fraction of the user base it does today, that night we saw a preview of what Instagram would enable at a much larger scale down the road.

Now, nearly two and a half years later, over 100 million people use Instagram every month. It’s easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company, but I think the truth is that it’s an accomplishment for our community. Now, more than ever, people are capturing the world in real-time using Instagram—sharing images from the farthest corners of the globe. What we see as a result is a world more connected and understood through photographs.”

Co-founder Kevin Systrom explained Instagram’s growth at GigaOM’s Roadmap event in November, saying its focus on speed and reliability let the company continually refine one product rather than spread itself too thin. The company launched in October 2010 and sold to Facebook in May 2012. In November Systrom said he wasn’t worried about challenges from Twitter’s photo filters product or a video product, since Instagram was built to be something different:

“Instagram is a community, not a filters app,” he said at the event.

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Instagram rolls out new updates, notes temporary privacy display error

Eliza Kern — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 05:05:37 +0000

Instagram is currently in the process of rolling out a few minor updates to the app Thursday night, including a new pink-ish filter called Mayfair, iOS6 integration allowing for easier Facebook sign-ups to the app, the addition of several new languages, and updates to how users can upload their photos to the app. The minor changes likely won’t matter much to the users still frustrated over the company’s controversial terms of service updates released this week, but a glitch that appears for some iOS users who have their photos set to private could cause concern until the company finds a fix.

The company noted that this version of Instagram has a limited issue where some iOS users with the new version who set their photos to private might not appear to have done so when looking at their settings page, a display error that Instagram said it is “actively” working to fix. The company confirmed that as long as photos are set to private, they will indeed be private – as explained on on the help page for this topic — even if the settings page shows otherwise. Users can check their profile screen where they can see follower counts to confirm this, where the display is accurate. Presumably the company will fix the display issue quickly, since needless to say, photo privacy has been a hot button topic recently.

Update: An Instagram spokeswoman confirmed Friday morning that the glitch had been fixed, and the privacy displays are now accurate across the app.

The iOS6 recognition, which will allow Instagram users to sign up for the app without ever heading to Facebook’s screen, comes as the two companies continue to slowly merge together after this fall’s finalized acquisition. With billions of users, it’s becoming more and more likely to that new converts to Instagram might already have a Facebook account, enabling an easier sign-up process.

The company is adding support for 25 new languages, including Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and others. While Instagram isn’t a particularly text-based app, the additions will provide sign-up instructions for those languages, and with apps like Path finding great success in non-U.S. markets including Asia, this addition makes sense. Camera updates include the fact that front-facing camera photos will no longer show up as mirrored, or flipped, and users can select photos from places other than the camera roll, helpful for people who organize photos in multiple folders.

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Twitter takes aim at Instagram with its own shot at photo filters

Eliza Kern — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 22:56:54 +0000

It might look like just a tint of color on top of a smartphone photo, but Twitter’s reported foray into the territory of photo-sharing and filtering could be a huge move for the social network as it continues to look for ways to grow its revenue and influence. Nick Bilton at the New York Times reports that Twitter will soon be adding the ability to filter photos before uploading them to the service, mimicking Instagram’s secret sauce and potentially making Facebook’s pricey acquisition less valuable.

So far, Instagram and Facebook have dominated the photo-sharing and upload experience, and their combination this year was one of the most talked-about acquisitions in Silicon Valley. Twitter has been working this summer to monetize its product, cracking down on API use and introducing new forms of advertising, so moving into the profitable photo space makes sense for the company. In fact, Twitter blocked users from finding their Twitter friends through Instagram, signaling the beginnings of divisions between the companies, although it was rumored that Twitter had earlier been interested in an acquisition of the photo-sharing service before Zuckerberg made his move.

As Om Malik wrote earlier this year, photo-sharing is the ultimate social experience on the web, and the medium that makes us tick. It’s what powers Facebook and keeps people tagging and liking and sharing. Photos create a dramatic level of engagement, and for a site like Twitter that’s looking to grow users and brand experiences, having its own compelling photo experience will be key (as seen above with Instagram filters applied to a photo of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.)

Twitter is also making a play into the media world, and as any website or magazine will tell you, photos are a must-have in the digital media space. Instagram photos of Hurricane Sandy spread quickly across the internet this week, and if Twitter could control how its users communicate text and images in real-time, that would up the ante. Users who leave Twitter to upload and share photos are a missed opportunity for the company.

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