PORTLAND, Maine (NEWS CENTER) - Facebook has had a busy week. With their stock not performing as well as they had hoped in it's first week, they have been quietly rolling out a few apps to help you use the service better on a mobile device. Most notably is an app they released Thursday simply called Facebook: Camera.
Our NEWS CENTER social media coordinator, Brett Whitmarsh, is here with some thoughts on the new app. Why are they doing this now?
It's been a rough week for Facebook and from a user standpoint the majority of their complaints come from their mobile side. So these apps are a way to say to investors look what we're already doing one week out.
So why the camera app?
It's one of three apps Facebook is trying to get the word out about this week. Some have speculated their new plan is to saturate the App market to show what they can still do. The camera app though is actually what has most of us scratching our heads. Facebook just started the process to buy Instagram for 1 Billion dollars. For anyone who isn't familiar with that service, it's a social media service and an app just for sharing photos. It's become very popular in the last two years and it caught Mark Zuckerberg's attention. Let's take a quick look at Instagram. Once you take a picture, you can edit the picture a bit, add a comment and post it. Pretty simple.
Now let's look at the Facebook Camera app. It's being called a clone of the Instagram app. A lot of people wondered if this would happen. It functions almost identical to the Instagram app. Same look, feel, options.
So let's take a picture... And now we can choose a filter if we like... There are many options. Once you've done that you can tag someone and then upload it.
The App also allows you to to enjoy other peoples photos better in tis app. So it is nice if you do a lot of photo sharing on Facebook. You can enjoy others photos better and upload multiple photos at the same time which you can't do on the regular Facebook app.
So how can folks get this app?
It was released today for the iPhone market, and some savvy Android users have said there was a version like this that came out a few months ago, but Facebook says this is a different app and that the Android market will see one like this soon.
Can you control your privacy settings on this app?
When you first start to use the app an alert pops up. It basically says that the app needs "location services" enabled to function. So when you enable this for your photos, it embeds the GPS location of where you took or from where you uploaded the photo. Personally, I don't like the option taken away from me. It basically is saying if you want to use this app, you need to agree to have your location put into your photo when you post. I did try to use the app without this enabled and it doesn't allow me to upload only view others images.