Anthony De Rosa

Facebook is launching a stand-alone photo sharing mobile application. This comes weeks after the social network bought Instagram for a billion dollars.

Someone please explain to me why this makes sense.

Here’s why I ask. Instagram, after its 2010 launch, quickly became the most popular photo sharing application on mobile devices. After the acquisition, many users feared that Facebook would ruin the Instagram app. Until now, Facebook has left the product alone. That was a wise move.

And now comes along this new mobile app, called “Facebook Camera.” In almost all aspects, it’s an inferior product to Instagram. The interface is clumsy; the filters are not as good; the product feels like something someone developed long before Instagram and was crushed out of existence.

Facebook should leave Instagram alone, but allow existing Facebook users to log into Instagram using their Facebook login. Some folks make the argument that Instagram users don’t want Facebook users on the Instagram network. I think that this is anti-social. Remember this: Instagram never wanted to be the cool indie band you liked before they became popular. They always wanted — and still want — to be as big as, or bigger, than Facebook. To appease these people, perhaps you decide to use Instagram in a “Path”-like experience, where you allow only people you want to view your photos by making your profile “invite-only.” This is already available on Instagram so I don’t so what the issue is. Path is a competing photo-sharing app that is banking on people only wanting to photo share with small groups and not the general public.

Facebook had easier options that it could have considered beside launching its own mobile app. Yet it pursued that path. Producing an inferior product must have cost money and certainly must have taken time to develop. Even if the app were developed before Facebook bought Instagram, it would have been less damaging for Facebook to pretend that it had never existed than to confuse the marketplace by introducing two competing products from the same company.

What were they thinking?

Facebook unveiled a number of new opportunities for advertising on their social network today, the biggest being the ability to post ads to mobile devices, which they had not yet been offering.

Facebook calls the new ad opportunities “Premium for Facebook” and it opens up the following placements:

• Larger ads on the side of the Facebook home page that users see when they first log in
• Ads that run inside the Facebook Newsfeed
• Ads on mobile devices
• Ads that appear when a user logs out of Facebook
• The ability to run video ads on all these placements

We were not aware of just how many folks were using Facebook on mobile until they filed for their IPO. According to the filing, there were 425 million monthly active users of Facebook’s mobile products in December 2011. This gives advertisers another opportunity to get their products in front of Facebook users. Mobile is growing at an incredible pace. eMarketer estimates Facebook’s ad rev will pass $5 billion this year, accounting for 6.5% of all online ad spending. That doesn’t even factor in the new ad opportunities they’ve unveiled today.

Here’s more on the way Facebook makes money from Reuters TV: Tech Tonic

If you were to stop independent journalist Tim Pool on the street, you may think he’s just a bike messenger, with his skull cap, hoodie and shoulder strap bag. What you may miss is that Pool has transformed himself into a mobile journalist. He broadcast live videos in the midst of the Occupy movement using just an iPhone, a solar powered backpack and even a drone to an audience of thousands.

What goes into making a great application? In a three part series I sit down with Richard Ting, SVP of Social and Mobile Platforms at R/GA to find out.