Guardian clicky
Blimey.

Mark

Can't help thinking that valuation's a little high.

Oh cool, hopefully we'll see some effects filter through for PC-uploaded photos too.

Not cool. Not cool at all.

I find it all hard to reconcile with any sort of economic reality. A company that produces nothing but is somehow worth billions of dollars buys another company that produces nothing for more billions of dollars. Someone explain to me how we're not heading headlong towards yet another crash, or at least another dot com bubble burst?

Jon

This.
I've never liked the results of this application, and that's why I've never used it.
Good luck to Fb if it sees something it likes in the app.

Mark

Can't say I've ever used it, but if it's anything like Vignette for Android I don't see the problem.

Oooh! Can we talk about Twitter now?

Dotcom 2.0 here we come.

Instantaneous has a lot of users. Some are Facebook users, some won't be, but all their images are there on Facebook's systems now.

Available for use in adverts. Right now, Facebook adverts may put a picture of your Friend with a "so-and-so likes this" or similar. I can only imagine that eventual,y all those user uploaded images will become part of the Facebook monetization machine.

Instagram could provide Facebook with a flock of cheap (read: unpaid) photographers.

Which are, by and large, compressed to hell and badly manipulated with crappy digital filters.

Mark

Edit : I am, clearly, talking about the images, not the photographers.

And how are they making their billion dollars back from this again? I mean, in any time scale less than the geological. Out of the millions of photographs uploaded every year, all but a handful are worthless. And how exactly are they going to trudge through those millions of images to find the few that may actually be useful? As oppose to just buying images to use in adverts from stock photo libraries, the prices of which have plummeted recently? Do you know how many stock images you can buy for a billion dollars? Do you know how many entire stock image libraries you could buy for a billion dollars?

It's codswallop. It's imagined value for something that actually worthless in the hope that it will con someone else into believing it's worth something and paying for it. Which they won't. They will never, ever get their money back but in the end that doesn't matter because the money never actually existed in the first place. It's never ever been anything other than speculative value on a company which itself produces nothing that has any residual value at all.

It's a gigantic piece of illusory mathematics and every time the imaginary waveform of money collapses, people lose their jobs and homes and, occasionally, lives. And I for one am royally fed up with it.

Jon

Well that pretty much describes Capitalism full stop.

As someone posted on Twitter, which I have to paraphrase from memory:

The irony. Kodak gives up on film cameras and then a company with 10 employees that makes pictures that look like they were taken with an Instamatic gets bought for 1bn.

Everything is speculative. However, all those photos uploaded to Facebook and Twitter have to be worth something somewhere in the money making mix. Even if that is an imaginary value, it's costing Facebook and Instagram real money to do this. At some point, they will be wanting to change that expense into an income generator.

Oh yes? Why? Your photos have no value to me, nor mine to you. The objective value of almost all of the photos uploaded is absolutely nothing. The only way anyone in the web 2.0 business makes genuine money - rather than 'well we have no idea how to make money from it now but at some point in the future when we've figured out how to make money from it it will be worth this much' utter tomfoolery - is by advertising and the amount of advertising money is not infinite. After Google has taken their share, how much do you think there is left?


Well, it's not like the stock markets have a history of ludicrously over-valuing tech companies and it coming unstuck on them or anything... What's the quote? 'Those who refuse to learn from the mistakes of the past are destined to repeat them'?

Jon