Facebook Targets Instagram With Photo Filters
Get ready for the photo-filter wars to begin. — Facebook plans to add a series of photo filters to its mobile application in the coming months with the hopes of drawing off fans of Instagram, the popular photo-sharing application.
Context & Ripple Effects
In August 2011 Facebook sits at peak scale — a record 162 million U.S. unique visitors in July per comScore, and 870 million global uniques ahead of YouTube and Yahoo — yet its mobile photo experience is plain next to Instagram's filtered aesthetic. The plan to ship native photo filters into the Facebook mobile app is a direct strike at the feature that made the startup popular.
The move lands weeks after Facebook quietly updated its Platform policies on July 27, 2011 to bar developers from linking out to competitors, and days after it simplified sharing controls. An app whose distribution runs through Facebook's social graph now finds the platform owner building the product itself.
First-order effects
- Instagram loses its core differentiator the moment filters ship inside an app with roughly triple YouTube's reach, forcing it to defend growth on community and brand rather than the filter feature alone.
- Facebook's mobile users get creative photo tools natively, removing the need to bounce between a separate capture app and the network where their friends already are.
Second-order effects
- The July 2011 Platform terms barring developer links to competitors sharpen the dependence question for Instagram-class apps: the same company whose graph they rely on for distribution is now both gatekeeper and rival.
- Other networks with heavy photo sharing face pressure to match filter tooling quickly or watch mobile engagement drift toward whichever feed makes ordinary snapshots look better.
Third-order effects
- If platform owners keep cloning the signature features of breakout mobile apps, standalone services must compete on network effects and speed of iteration rather than any single feature — a structure that favors incumbents holding the social graph.
- The pattern points toward scrutiny of how platforms treat the developers who build on them, since the combination of rival products and restrictive API terms concentrates power in the platform owner.
The trend: Social platforms are absorbing the signature features of standalone mobile apps, making feature replication the incumbent's primary weapon against startups built on top of their networks.