Why Facebook Just Launched Its Own Instagram

Just a month after announcing its plans to devour hit app Instagram to the tune of $1 billion, Facebook has released its very own photo sharing app. But is two a crowd?

Camera, Facebook's brand new photo sharing app, is built to do precisely the same thing as its wildly popular stepsister, but it feeds directly into Facebook rather than into Instagram's walled garden, population 40 million and growing. It may not officially have Instagram DNA, but Facebook Camera offers up a palette of 14 filters to please any budding mobile photog, though they sport more literal labels ("Neon" and "Golden") than in Instagram's own moody toolkit.

Tinker with your photo (you know you want to crop it into a square, go ahead), apply a filter to set the tone, tag a friend and send it straight to Facebook. Like Instagram photos on Facebook, it'll appear on your Timeline at full-width - and fast. Facebook Camera, which was built independently of Kevin Systrom and co., runs circles around the regular Facebook app in terms of speed and navigability. If you mainly use Facebook to share photos with friends, Facebook Camera is a sleek, lightweight way to beam your pictures to the social network - but it's no Instagram.

Or Is It?

Facebook Camera takes more than a few cues from the photo sharing service we all know and love, but it's got a leg up with that whole 90-plus-million-strong active userbase. But why did Facebook make its very own Instagram at all? Facebook has been building this app for the better part of a year, since well before it successfully put the moves on Instagram. In fact, at least some photo filter features were ready to roll last August, according to engineers involved with the project.

Facebook couldn't just sit on its hands while Instafever spread like so much Toaster-tinted wildfire. As the company made a move for the photo sharing app, it was smart to develop its own in parallel - it certainly has the resources to do so. Facebook Camera was insurance that the king of social won't look like a lumbering giant next to the hot photo filtering craze that has all the social media whippersnappers in a tizzy. Instagram innovated, and gave us something we didn't know we needed until there we were, huddled over an iPhone screen tweaking a teensy square photo with the zeal of a less digital artist. As ReadWriteWeb Editor-at-Large Dan Frommer puts it, "Facebook bought Instagram because it?s doing something new and different that?s special; because it represented the biggest existing threat to Facebook." It wanted to assure us that, as the true sovereign of social, it can meet the evolving needs of its vast kingdom - there's no need to let our eyes wander.

Is Facebook's new app Insta-redundant? The polished little in-house photo app - which was developed independently of the Instagram team - must have been burning a hole in Facebook's pocket. And the company might as well siphon off Instagrammers while it watches the clock - they'll all end up in the same place anyhow.

Beyond Instagram, Facebook Camera also throws some elbows in the direction of Google+'s slick photo features. Google+ is still floundering when it comes to engaging users, but the site has a dedicated base of photogs who enjoy tools like Instant Upload and the large lightbox photo view, which Facebook mixed into its own recipe in February.

Camera isn't Facebook's only spinoff app. Last year it released Messenger, another service that serves its purpose far better than the Facebook app itself. Just like with the ill-fated Pool Party and the advent of Google+, there likely isn't room for two.

It's hard to say what Facebook will do with its new set of photo sharing nesting dolls. Once the Instagram buy goes through (assuming it's smooth sailing), the social giant will have the choice of integrating the two, or deep sixing one altogether. And after Instagram's loyalist outcry, it'd be wise to handle both the popular product and the brand with kid gloves. May the best-loved app win.

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Add a Little Sparkle to Your Life

There are times, for many of us, when daily life can prove to be uninspiring, monotonous and, even, dull.?Family and work responsibilities weigh heavily, leaving us feeling tired and running low on energy.

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April Showers (And March Planting) Bring May Flowers

When you look out at your yard considering what landscaping you can do, chances are this is one of the first thought that comes to your mind: "As soon as spring comes around..." While you could wait until the official start of spring (March 20th) to plant a flowering tree in your yard, that's not necessarily the best option. Here's why.

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Guantanamo Lawyers Make Mockery of Court

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Did You Know That When You Buy Plants It Can Attract Birds to Your Yard?

When we buy plants it can not only make our home feel good, our yard look well but also add value to our property. Buying plants can give our yard life as well as bring new life into it with birds, butterflies and dragonflies.

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New Prize for Bio-Sensors Announced by X Prize Foundation

Today the X Prize Foundation announced a $2.25 million Nokia Sensing X Challenge to produce a new generation of health care and biometric sensors. This adds a new health-related prize to their roster of other scientific challenges, including a $10 million prize to produce a wireless health monitor like the Star Trek Tricorder, another $10 million prize for gene sequencing, and a $30 million prize sponsored by Google to bring back robotic lunar landers.

Bio-sensors have lagged behind other kinds of sensors. Robert McCray, the CEO of the Wireless Life Sciences Alliance, mentioned how many sensors could be found in your average car or phone, which eclipse what is available in the life sciences market. For example, your typical cellphone includes sensors such as a camera, a microphone, a GPS, haptic/touch and an accelerometer. The alliance claims to be the only trade organization focused exclusively on identifying collaboration opportunities within the wireless health sector, and was holdng its annual conference this week in San Diego.

As with other of its prizes, this one attempts to stimulate a revolution and create an ecosystem of innovators in the bio-sensing area. "We want to give inventors a platform to show their stuff to the entire planet to help expand health care to move beyond disease management," said the CEO of X Prize Foundation Peter Diamandis (shown) at the launch of the new competition. Entries will be judged on several metrics, including validity, usability, originality and affordability. Sensors can be developed in several categories, including biofluids, kinematics, body physics, mood and emotion detection.

This contest is partnered with the Tricoder competition. Diamandis mentioned that the sensors coming out of the Nokia challenge could be put into handheld consumer devices that will be developed for these Tricorders. So far, 185 teams from 25 countries have signalled that they will be entering the Tricorder contest, which was announced in January at CES in Vegas.

According to the contest website, "As sensing is an enormous, heterogeneous field, there will be no specific benchmarks established for any of these criteria. Instead, the Nokia Sensing X CHALLENGE will rely on the judges? expert knowledge and the teams? submitted material to establish notability."

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What Yahoo's New Axis Browser Gets Wrong - and Right

Yahoo just joined the browser game. The veteran Web company, which has been struggling to define its focus for years, is suddenly betting on the mobile space with a new browser called Axis.

The product combines an iOS Web browser with a plugin for most major desktop browsers that syncs a user's Web history and bookmarks across their devices. How does Axis stack up? 

Effective Design and Seamless Cross-Device Syncing 

One feature that Axis offers - and should be standard in any tablet or smartphone Web browser - is its ability to sync bookmarks and recent activity across devices. Safari does this to some extent, but could go further. Frankly, this is one area in which Google could do a better job on iOS. Its official iPad app could almost serve as a Web browser, but it doesn't sync with a user's Chrome browsing or search history.

Web browsing is far too fractured across our desktops, smartphones and tablets. Axis makes a noble attempt to address this issue. 

Yahoo has taken great care to ensure that Axis takes advantage of the tablet form factor when it comes to design. It reimagines search results and instead of presenting them as a list of links, shows tiled thumbnails that preview each page.

The design could be more mind-blowing, but it does a better job of being tablet-centric than a lot of other search and browsing apps.  

Too Yahoo-Focused

We understand that the whole purpose of this product is to keep users engaged with Yahoo's brands (and ultimately drive search volume and ad dollars), but its aggressive efforts feel excessive. 

For example, when we type the letter "f" into the search query box, the auto-suggestions are Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Fantasy Baseball, Yahoo Horoscopes and Flickr.  Not Facebook. Not any commonly-used search query term that start with "f." This is something that Google would get lambasted for doing. It doesn't serve the user anywhere near as well as it serves Yahoo. 

Social Integration: The Pros and Cons

Like any Web browser worth using, Axis has social sharing options built right into the toolbar. Twitter is there, of course. Its Pinterest integration is tighter than we've ever seen in a browser, which is nice to see with such a young social network. 

Conspicuously absent, however, is the world's largest social network. Facebook doesn't make an appearance in the browser's default sharing options, nor does Tumblr or any other popular tool besides Pinterest, Twitter and good old-fashioned email. Weird.

Social integration in any app needs to go deeper than simple sharing buttons at this point. The Dolphin browser is a good model to follow in this regard. 

Wait, Is This a Browser or a Search App? 

Yahoo is marketing this as a new browser, but is it really? Sure, it can navigate to any URL on the Web, but it feels more geared toward searching, which makes sense considering who built it. 

People who uses Yahoo's Web services - and there are quite a lot of them - will likely find Axis to be pretty useful. Any hope Yahoo had of making headway into the mobile browser space, however, is limited by Apple's refusal to allow users to change the default browser on iOS devices. 

There's so much potential that exists in the tablet browser space in particular. Apple certainly hasn't fulfilled it. In launching what sometimes feels like a glorified search engine for iOS, Yahoo doesn't quite fulfill it either, but overall the effort is a step in the right direction.  

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