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Codebreaker

New Instagram is, surprise, more Facebooky

John Moe Aug 17, 2012

It’s no surprise, really. If Facebook bought a dog, the dog would become more Facebooky too. Start encouraging other dogs to share more about themselves, post ads in the poops it leaves in the yard. That kind of thing.

The latest update on the Instagram photo sharing app, famously acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars earlier this year, features a lot more geolocation capabilities, aimed at getting people to share share share.

From GigaOm:

In the new version you can select photos you wish to make public and they get pinned to a location. For instance, if you have ten photos from Helsinki, Finland, they all get clustered together. These clusters are visible as collections on a map. You can see many collections on the map and can tap to zoom in (or out) to get a closer and more contextual view.


GigaOm also proposes that Instagram is positioning itself as an alternative to Twitter for the young people who like the shiny new things. It’s also an alternative to Facebook, even though it’s owned by Facebook:

This scale of growth – hundreds of photos uploaded per second and a total of more than 4 billion photos – the company is starting to look like a rival to Twitter as a place for social conversations. Today, Twitter is much bigger, but Instagram is growing at a rapid clip. Instagram has become popular with youngsters who are bypassing Facebook and Twitter and instead communicating via photos and comments on Instagram.

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