Instagram + Facebook

News of the day, Social media giant Facebook has acquired Instagram for $1 Billion USD.

As expected, the news rock all social media enthusiasts. I heard more dismay than satisfaction, however. (Sorry, our mighty Mark, despite people use your service, they don't like it) Some of you may noticed, the sharing from Instagram to Facebook has changed a bit not so long ago, from a URL posting to Photo uploading. Now we know it's a hint we all missed.

From Facebook point of view, possibly they want to use Instagram as a gateway of Facebook photo uploading. Instagram, of course, have preconfigured filters for their users to enrich their photo, which Facebook can take advantage of. But more important is, Instagram has a very loyal user-based, especially the iOS users (and I have guessed it wrong, Android users have accepted it well since the app launched in their platform, gosh...). Many of them are really happy to share photo on Instagram, but not Facebook.

In some way, different social media services have their own position or function in the social media universe. Some people shared their daily photo (e.g. Baby, Food, Dessert... ) in Facebook. And they saved their artistic shots only for Instagram. That's what I do. It sounds funny but true that I don't want to share those to some of my Facebook friends.

But the mighty Mark probably has another vision. Facebook does not only target to a specific position. Facebook has to be everything. We have been watching Facebook put their palm on every way that the social media universe has ever expanded into. Status, Content Sharing, Likes, Location, Timeline... Now maybe Mark wants all your artistic photo as well. He wanna draw every photo from you onto their social media empire.

I won't be surprised if Instagram had the "Share to Facebook" button missing later. It means, it shares all your posting to Facebook by default.

Not so long ago, we had a news that Instagram finally decided to open their Media Posting API. This API has been missing with a reason that Instagram wanna take control on the photo quality. If they open this API, it means photo posting not necessarily go through their App. And it means third-party App can post freely without control. Those third-party uploaded photo may not as coherent in look and feel of the Instagram-ish photo. This could easily pollute your Instagram feed.

However, they started to open the posting API to certain service. Hipstagram partnered with Instagram so they can grant the Posting API access. Guesses are this posting API will get more open. To other partnered service in the first stage, for example.

Now we have Facebook kicked-in.

My guess is, Instagram will be more open than ever, and be real quick. I used to think Instagram will keep their Hipstagram model, you need to have your services approved by them, to make sure your service won't post some too-low quality photo to Instagram. But now they are under Facebook. Facebook is all about statistic. It's quantity over quality. They probably won't care much if the photo looks good. They just want people keep posting to Instagram, and comes to Facebook eventually.

"They are all mine now!"

Now, share you some (not so) confidential information. I have been developing an Instagram API iOS project which I would like to open source after my Instagram App completed. I have reached a certain bottleneck at the moment (on graphic design). But anyway, Appstore submission is targeted at the end of May, see if I can make the API project launch in July... Not sure if it will be affected by the acquisition. lol

As always, don't panic, happy coding.