[niketdesai]

This.

Two things people do that FB wants channeled through their systems: Photos & Chat.

Replacing your camera app with FBs means that all photos go to Facebook, which also represents the most important content on Facebook.

If your photos and your friends photos are all on FB then they go to FB.

If everyone you know is on FB then you'll probably use FB to talk to them. Thus, the chat ecosystem. Because FB is device and OS agnostic, it works even better than what Apple is trying to do with iMessage.

So why separate apps? Because people today already do these things as separate apps. You take a photo with your camera and then upload to FB. Now you just take a photo. This is actually what Google does with G+ and its automatic photo uploads. But FB can't do that, because they don't own the device ecosystem so this is their technique...for now.

[AJ007]

Friends uploading all of their photos to Facebook,

Pros: -Pictures of their girlfriends naked

Cons: -A complete lack of relevance and editorial purview.

Every photo a user uploads to Facebook sends a message about who that person is. Out of about 300 photos I take on my iPhone, 1 makes it to Facebook. I have a few friends that upload lots of crap. For the most part, those friends had their feeds blocked by me fairly quick. These are not interchangeable events.

Facebook's biggest threat is a loss of meaning through noise, not users using an alternative app to capture their media.

As for Facebook Messenger, I'll be damned if I let Facebook permanently record every last one of my private message for eternity.

[niketdesai]

"Facebook's biggest threat is a loss of meaning through noise, not users using an alternative app to capture their media."

This is true of any data aggregator and visualizer. I'd argue they, probably next to Twitter, are the best at attempting to handle it within a social context.

I guess my thought about photos is incomplete in that making FB a storage for media means that your mean average of shared media will go up as well (it's already there, might as well). We see this in bulk uploads.

I agree that there is a certain amount of selectivity involved - but we vary as individuals. I think only in the last couple of years, after the fad of being able to toss everything online in heaps - have we begun to understood how our online perception is made.

"As for Facebook Messenger, I'll be damned if I let Facebook permanently record every last one of my private message for eternity."

Agreed. That's why I'm off it.

[smackfu]

Plus it's pretty seamless replacement. Same label "Camera". Same icon, just with a blue background instead of grey.

[malandrew]

TBH, I'm kind of surprised Apple is totally cool with this since one of the AppStore guidelines is to not create apps that replicate core iOS features. Now I know that Facebook's Camera app does more than take photos, but they are a direct replacement for the Camera and Photos apps that are native to iOS. Making the name and icon so very similar is close enough to be construed as an obvious intent to confuse/mislead.

[timjahn]

I noticed that when changing the location settings in "Settings". The default Camera app was listed immediately next to Facebook Camera, confused me for a moment.

I wonder if Apple will make them add "Facebook" to the app name to avoid confusion, since it's the exact same name currently.

[jmathai]

Smart move. Didn't realize it at first :)