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Introducing Facebook Camera

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Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#111

Post by krakensden »

tferris wrote: post #81
Smudge wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to veer too far from the main discussion, but 'git' isn't just some giant monolithic binary. The 'git' command is a wrapper around a bunch of different, relatively modular binaries. They each even have their own man page. (e.g. 'git push' maps to 'git-push'). Each is just a unique action that can be applied to a common data structure (the git repository).

I know. And still all these different libs are accessible by one UI/route ('git').

Do an ls /usr/libexec/git-core/ (or your operating system's equivalent) some time. The fact that the porcelain exists does not mean that the plumbing does not.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#112

Post by bishnu »

sriramk wrote: post #71

How does the app know who I am without asking me to log into Facebook? Is it guessing somehow from my FB app's login + UUID? Or am I missing something basic

I don't have the Facebook app on my iPhone (I used to but I deleted it) yet Camera still dumped me into my FB account with no login. Odd.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#115

Post by jrockway »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #101
clarky07 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do it on iOS as well. You can go from the facebook camera app to the main fb app. (Any app can do this, but the point of the article is fb so i used them as the example)

Is the link between the two apps hardcoded on iOS? On Android you can have any camera app | any photo editing/filters app | any social network upload where each app is chosen by the user which seems closer to the idea of pipes to me.

This is a great example; it almost works like UNIX pipes except that each application has to take an explicit action to share its result with the next application in the pipeline. But like UNIX apps that do something anti-social like rewrite the input file (hello, GNU Recode), that can be worked around.

For those of you that don't use Android, the process works like this. You take a picture. The camera app provides a "share" button. You click "share". Then you're presented with a list of all applications that handle photos. So you can share to G+, or email a photo, or run it through filters, or whatever. The camera application never needs to know about the filter application (the reverse is also true). This makes it very easy to reuse code and for users to design their own workflows. Platforms don't really like this, since they don't have total control over the user experience, but for us users, it's pretty darn nice.

(You can also register URL handlers, so that something like clicking a link to Google Maps in your email automatically opens up the Google Maps app to the same state. Again, pretty useful.)

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#116

Post by baby »

JCB_K wrote: post #8

I really don't see the point of separate apps. The main Facebook app, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Photos...what's next? Anyone who can enlighten me why this would be a good strategy? Seems like unnecessary fragmentation to me.

I actually asked myself this question several times until I recently found an answer.

They want to compete with what's app and bbm. Facebook messenger is the SMS application of people who have internet on their phone. It's actually brilliant when you think about it!

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#117

Post by baby »

cletus wrote: post #99

I said earlier today [1] that mobile proposes a strategic risk to Facebook as they don't control the mobile platform like Apple or Google. This is really the best they can do to change that. I believe they're attempting to create a base mobile experience and use that as a selling point for mobile devices. On iOS for example there are standard apps for Mail, Maps, Search (browser), etc. I wouldn't be surprised if you…

This!

My Android phone (HTC Desire) recently broke and I got a old iPhone 3G. One feature (among a lot of others) I really missed was being able to combine a contact with his facebook account. This feature could really make my next purchase be an android phone and not something else.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#118

Post by AJ007 »

niketdesai wrote: post #59
dominostars wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the iOS paradigm to make feature simple standalone apps. Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contacts" app? Many users upload photos to Facebook, so there's a huge incentive to make an app that makes it simple to do this. Even if the main Facebook app has feature parity with FBPhotos, it's still going to come with all of the cruft.

This. Two things people do that FB wants channeled through their systems: Photos & Chat. Replacing your camera app with FBs means that all photos go to Facebook, which also represents the most important content on Facebook. If your photos and your friends photos are all on FB then they go to FB. If everyone you know is on FB then you'll probably use FB to talk to them. Thus, the chat ecosystem. Because FB is device a…

Friends uploading all of their photos to Facebook,

Pros: -Pictures of their girlfriends naked

Cons: -A complete lack of relevance and editorial purview.

Every photo a user uploads to Facebook sends a message about who that person is. Out of about 300 photos I take on my iPhone, 1 makes it to Facebook. I have a few friends that upload lots of crap. For the most part, those friends had their feeds blocked by me fairly quick. These are not interchangeable events.

Facebook's biggest threat is a loss of meaning through noise, not users using an alternative app to capture their media.

As for Facebook Messenger, I'll be damned if I let Facebook permanently record every last one of my private message for eternity.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#119

Post by tga »

alexpenny wrote: post #75
mkr-hn wrote: post #52

The style reminds me a lot of Google+. It's good that they're willing to accept design inspiration from outside Facebook.

A lot of the people working on the app were from Sofa.

The Zowieso reference in the screenshots is a nice hint to that, it was (is?) the Sofa company cat.
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