Facebook Buys Instagram

How to think about this : 

1) Facebook is in the face recognition business. (They run algorithms on all the photos posted to them)

2) Facebook (as all the big social network are) is in the "find where people are" business. ("locative services")

You don't even have to go conspiracy theorist (Facebook part owned by the CIA) to see that Instagram gives Facebook another massive injection of photo data about who is where with who and when. And that this can be mined for all sorts of valuable information and patterns.

FB can discover relationships between people and places that no-one has explicitly told them about. They can tell advertisers where you like to hang-out socially. And who with. You think they aren't trying "sentiment analysis" to try to figure out whether people in photos are happy or sad? What's it worth to FB to know which bars in London have the happiest customers? Or which companies have the most drunken
employees? Or that you like motorcycles?

Google are after this data too. That's why they just brought out  wearable "glasses" that can tell Google what you're looking at. Instagram might very well be Facebook's response in the "grab" for rich visual data streams.

Some people are noting the potential threat to FB from Pinterest too and saying this is a defensive move. Today is a great day for Pinterest. Someone will be trying to snap that up soon.

Yep, Dave's done it again.

Update : And, of course, if Dave's FlickrFan takes off. It really won't be hard at all to upgrade it to do video, and then river of checkbox news.

For the BBC or NBC or Fox or CNN, now would be a great time to start paying attention and trying to get into this.

If I was Apple, I'd be dropping the price of the MacMini to take advantage of this launch : "Buy a MacMini NOW for only $400 before end of January and get Flickrfan preinstalled". OTOH, if I was Microsoft I'd assign a couple of people on helping port this application to Windows PDQ.

And if I was Flickr ... you know, I'd at least mention it on my blog.

Update 2 : Now, I wonder if this kind of newsmap would work well on a big screen.

Update 3 : Bonus Link. Remember this? :

Winer has nothing like the resources of Apple, but look, he's created the same shape of platform : he's got the content, he's got the nice reader, he's got the flow going through his middleware. And now he can start innovating on top of that.

Good end of year round-up from Marc Canter.

... we believe within one year they’ll be LOTS of social media features being plopped into existing productivity software, Intranets and legacy apps, etc.

Meanwhile Dave launches his photos from Flickr over RSS to your TV thing.