> Actually, Facebook was first.

I followed my friends' photos on Flickr when Facebook was still a php website for Harvard grads...

This strengthens your point however; first is overrated.

I used Altavista when the most famous "Larry" amongst geeks was still called "Leisure Suit Larry".

Nope, that would be Larry Wall.

Not Larry Roberts?

Agreed. Like it is said in Immutable laws of Marketing book:

If you can't be first with an idea, be the first in a category. If not create the category and be the first in it.

I agree with everything you wrote, but couldn't resist adding: being first is good, being great is better, but being lucky is best. After a certain point entrepreneurs have to humble themselves down and accept the fact that sheer luck, or more scientifically, factors that you can't predict or model, play a huge role in the outcome. I'd say most people are overanalyzing this, there's no point in trying to analyze chaos, unless you're literally a theoretical physicist trying to predict an orbit somewhere.

Obviously they weren't the first mobile photo app. They were the first photo sharing app that let you ironically pretend to have a polaroid style camera like a massive bloody hipster. Polaroids became cool again just after the world's supply of polaroid film ran out. "New age fun, with a vintage feel." That's what they were first with, and that's ultimately why they're now rich.

I think the low quality of the photos the original few iPhones took had something to do with it as well. The hipster filters hid that low quality and allowed an artistic bent to what was otherwise a poor user experience.

I find myself using the filters less and less now I have a 4S.

I believe they also offered better sharing options than Apple offered, unlike Android which allows you to hand off these task between apps which you can download to add filter options or uploads intents.

Hipstamatic anyone?

Hipstamatic lacked sharing, at least when Instagram came out. That was the thing that set Instagram apart -- it did this popular thing with photos on your iPhone but bolted sharing on.

I started mobile photo sharing site Mobog.com in 2003. Instagram was executed about 10,000% better.

http://mobog.com

Your site was ahead of its time. Instagram had 7 years of improvements in the state of mobile hardware and software to build on top of.

Hey, could I ask you some questions about Mobog (via email)?

I couldn't easily find any contact info for you.

Mine is [email protected].

agreed. I started http://snaplog.com around the same time.

Yeah as mentioned, Flickr was/is basically a more complicated version of Instagram without the hipster tinge.

Also, pretty sure PicPlz came before Instagram, and for a long time had more users (must suck to be those guys right now).

I kind of figure they had simplicity on their side, combined with an initial target market of niche/boutique/hipster/grunge/retro, and the cherry on the cake was Facebook seeing them as a growing competitor in the photo sharing biz (that would have also added a threat to the value of their upcoming IPO). /2c

Flickr is something completely different. It's basically a suite of fun things you can do with photos, and designed so that one activity leads into another - searching, commenting, groups, tagging, searching, curating, apps...

Flickr failed to get into mobile partially because of Yahoo's interference -- but perhaps our approach was too complex for mobile. In the early days of Flickr, it was incredibly absorbing - people would waste hours on the site, just like Facebook. But that may require a bigger screen and more free time than someone has when they are on the go.

Flickr is to Instagram as Facebook is to Twitter.

It's not too complex for mobile, as proven by apps that aren't from Yahoo. (Yahoo's Flickr app is egregiously slow, almost as slow as FB's "HTML5" app.)

Yahoo should have purchased both FlickIt Pro and FlickStacker, perhaps changed them to white with a designer feel, and marketed them as Flickr Social and Flickr Pro. (Seems to me the two markets of users Flickr serves are people there for the photo community, and there for dealing with publishing high volumes of photos.)

FlickIt Pro opens to a "People" tab, with incredibly easy UI. This focus on people sets it apart.

FlickStacker is an incredibly full featured uploader and Flickr photo manager. I was able to post and manage ongoing full quality photo sets during a recent trip to Corsica using just my iPad and this app.

Flickr also should have worked with Apple to build a Flickr uploader built-in, as Apple did with Twitter. Twitter or Facebook is great for snapshots, while Flickr is for photography.

In addition to your analogy, I'd suggest that Flickr is to TwitPic as Photography is to Snapshots. The photography market gets overlooked (though 500px is moving in) but both pro and amateur creators appeal to Apple. Instagram and Facebook are not about photography, so Flickr could still own that term.

Today, I'd no longer argue for a button to "upload" to Flickr. I'd argue for pushing the Apple iCloud Photostream to a Flickr Photostream mirror set that users can rename, then letting Apple's native Camera or Photos app built-in share interface toggle the pre-uploaded photos' visibility to Family, Friends, and Public. This lets the sync happen in the cloud, decreases friction, and encourages more Pro accounts since users could run out of 200 free photos quickly.

I think it depends upon what you define as "first." The iMac wasn't the first computer in the sense that it wasn't the first machine with a keyboard, mouse, and operating system. But it was the first along many important dimensions including beautiful packaging and marketing, great software, etc. that are very difficult to pull off for companies attempting to create replicas (just look at how hard HP is trying to rip off the Macbook Pro). I think being first is absolutely important if you define first as being the first to create a well-executed specific product offering within a larger category. In many ways this sums up the evolution of products- one comes along that does things differently and much better than its predecessors. That in my opinion is what has made Apple so successful over the past decade- they have been the first in phones, desktops, laptops, tablets, and music sales along several very important dimensions.

Actually Instagram had first to be Burbn[1], which was failure, so that it could learn how to succeed.

[1] http://blog.spark59.com/2012/instagram-case-study/

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Hipstomatic launched before Instagram? This whole article is very condescending and the epitome of the death of TechCrunch.