Facebook For iOS Gets Photo Filters And Multi-Shot Sharing, Beating Twitter To The Punch
Don't trust the release notes. Facebook has just added photo filters to its iOS app, though the feature wasn't announced in the version 5.1 “What's New” that highlights multi-photo uploads, slide-out chat buddy list, and Gift giving.
Context & Ripple Effects
A May analysis had already framed Facebook’s photo strategy around the need for two distinct photo experiences. The same iOS release also bundles Gifts, a redesigned Messages interface and multi-photo uploads, making image editing part of a broader effort to make the native app a fuller social-action surface.
First-order effects
- Facebook’s iOS users can alter photos with filters before posting and assemble multiple photos in one upload, reducing separate steps between capture and sharing.
- Facebook gains a native photo-editing feature alongside the release’s messaging, Gifts and multi-photo tools.
Second-order effects
- The combined tools make Facebook’s iOS app more valuable as the place where users prepare and publish photo posts, rather than only where completed images are distributed.
- Facebook’s two-photo-app question becomes more acute: adding editing to the main app narrows the functional separation identified in the earlier analysis.
Third-order effects
- If Facebook continues to combine creation tools with sharing workflows, mobile social products will compete more directly on the end-to-end photo-posting experience rather than the feed alone.
The trend: Mobile social apps are folding lightweight creative tools into sharing flows to control more of the path from captured image to published post.