How do you feel about Instagram now that it's been bought by Facebook?

I feel like I wish my sons had been the developers. Other than that, a program that is owned and operated by Facebook is one I’m much less likely to use.

I don’t even know what instagram is or what their purchase of it means.

I didn’t care about them before yesterday.

I still don’t care about them.

I have no intention of using their product.

So Facebook wasted $1 billion. What do I care?

I have never heard of instagram.

I don’t trust Facebook with my private pictures. Casual stuff, like a shot of a pretty view, or a project I’m working on at the house is fine, but I have no desire to upload images to Facebook of my friends/family/myself.

I only started hearing of Instagram recently when a former coworker had a baby and started using it for her baby pictures. Instagram is a photo-sharing app. You can google it and learn more about it. It’s becoming more popular lately. Apparently Facebook felt it was a good gamble.

@jca Yes – I heard about it from one of my techie sons.

I read an article (I think in Forbes magazine) about how the value of Facebook is around $110 per user. The value of instagram ($1 billion for over 30 million users) was calculated to be around $30 per user. So, it seems like Facebook was trying to cheaply increase their userbase. One problem is that many Instagram users were probably already Facebook users, so the price per new user would go up considerably.

My intentions of using it were 0. Now they are negative. Facebook must be destroyed. Tyranny must be opposed. Tyrants must be hanged.

$1Billion?!?!

I had never even heard of Instagram until I read an article about Facebook buying it so, considering I had never heard of it, it was pretty unlikely that I would have used it at all and now that I’ve heard of it and know that Facebook owns it… I don’t know if there is anything “less likely” than “not at all.”

I don’t do anything with or on Facebook except post and keep up with family and friends. I don’t play any of their games, I don’t go to any links that involve whatever that message is that tells me that I am giving Facebook permission to access everything including, I believe, rummaging around in my underwear drawer and reading my diary, and I don’t log into any other site using my Facebook account or link my Facebook account to any other site. So, no, no Instagram for me, whatever it is.

@lillycoyote Hear, Hear! I’m with you on all of that!

Facebook doesn’t need the users. Most Instagram users already use facebook, they just want the application to integrate it into Facebook.

The endgame for Facebook is to build up a walled garden like AOL. The more they can keep users inside the facebook bubble and keep feeding them user data, the better.

@janbb I’m not sure if it really matters. Facebook knows everything anyway. I was not naive enough to think that Facebook isn’t pretty much all about collecting user data but I was kind of shocked when I read this article in the Village Voice, see page 2, second paragraph from the bottom… a young man in Ireland took Facebook to court to make them turn over the data they had collected on him and what he got from Facebook was a 1,222 page print out! Yikes! That’s kind of scary. What do they know about someone that could possibly require 1,222 pages of data?

@sinscriven Exactly right!

I have no feelings about this product – for or against. Facebook owning it makes no difference whatsoever for me.

What do you, personally, do with Instagram? Is it just an online filter service? Like you get if you have photoshop or something, only online? Does it give you photo storage space? What is its appeal?

@wundayatta: I don’t know, I don’t use it. You might Google it. Apparently it’s all the rage.

As far as I know, it is a photo posting and sharing service but what distinguishes it from all the others is unclear to me.

I just googled it (had googled it once before but forgot what it said) and the photos are square, and then you can choose a filter to change the look and feel of the photo. You can post the pix to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram is also like a FB of its own, so people post their photos and comment on others’ photos, site-wide photos of the day, etc.

@jca Yes. I read all that. It doesn’t help. I don’t understand why anyone cares. That’s why I’m hoping someone who actually uses it will tell me why they find it useful.