While this type of spike is not uncommon during IPOs and is in line with the trading debut patterns of other companies, subtle  swings in share price now have massive implications for the financial health of a company that began as a side project in a dorm room.

In other words, Facebook is now a serious business and the company’s financial health as a publicly traded company impacts not only it’s stakeholders, but all of us who work in digital media. Concerns over whether Facebook can maintain and increase its revenue and lack of a definitive mobile strategy underscore the larger debate over the value of social media and whether companies can leverage enterprises like Facebook to make money.

Given that so much of Facebook’s financial future rests in its ability to convert its users’ personal data into cash money for companies, it’s worth recalling a public poll by CNBC and the Associated price that revealed half of its respondents considered Facebook to be a passing “fad”.

Are they right? Share your thoughts through the poll at the bottom of the post or in the comments below.

In the meantime, here’s brief summarizing some of the opinions on either side of the issue.

Yes, Facebook is a fad.

“A lot of social networks have come, peaked out and were replaced by another with better features, more usable UI/technology, etc.,” observes a user on the question and answer website Quora. In this view, Facebook is just like any other tech companies that will ultimately lose market share to the next big thing. Failure to adapt or innovate often results in waning user interest and one only has to recall the likes of Friendster and MySpace – whom were once considered the Goliaths to Zuckerburg’s David – to project what kind of future may eventually lay ahead for Team Facebook.

Last year, reports also suggested, albeit briefly, that Facebook was actually losing daily active users in the US. Couple this with what seems like ongoing user complaints about privacy settings, tweaks to Facebook’s UI and that general panning of its recent Timeline UI evolution, it’s possible to think that Facebook users would jump ship to a competitor that handled these things better.  Well, if Facebook doesn’t acquire them first.

On the business end, it’s difficult to view Facebook’s big day without also considering the status of other publicly-traded companiesdriven by social including GroupOn, LinkedIn, Yelp and Zynga – the shares of which were, at the time of writing, trading down.

No, Facebook is here to say.

With a reportedly growing base of 900 million active monthly users, the social network will soon touch the lives of 1 in 6 people around the globe.  With this level of global penetration, it’s a slim chance that a Facebook competitor will ever be able to effectively challenge the social network’s domination. Other networks will be successful, but they will focus on niche verticals, innovative content flows or differentiated user experience.

Sure, Facebook isn’t for everyone, and the company’s mishandling of privacy concerns has been reason enough for many to shutter their accounts, but active users are spending more time on Facebook, both on desktop and mobile, than ever before. Facebook also still has tremendous opportunities in emerging markets like India, which is projected to overtake the US as the largest consumer base by country in 2015, and China, where current government restrictions have limited penetration to only .04%of the population. All indicates that Facebook’s best days are still yet to come.

This “fad” question is a half-assed. 

“Facebook, the product, satisfies the human need to keep in touch. This behavior is not a fad, “ notes another Quora user. That being said, nothing lasts forever and Facebook will  surely cease to exist someday.  But to dismiss Facebook as a “fad”, then, overlooks its significance as a technology that has redefined how we, as humans, communicate with one another.  Facebook will eventually fade away, whether due to an organic loss of interest from users or an executive misjudgment of user privacy, but Facebook won’t die overnight and, like the the telegraph or the telephone  shouldn’t be considered so much of a fad so much as an innovation that will influence communication technology for generations to come.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” wrote Zuckerberg to investors when it filed for its IPO back in February. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.” Eight years later, Facebook is anything but a temporary success, having proven it can accomplish this social mission, while being highly profitable as a private company.  But Friday’s IPO introduces a host of new challenges that make the company more vulnerable than ever to forces contrary to its original vision.  While Facebook’s fate may not happen in the short-term, its long-term destiny is now tied directly to a stock price that, when falling, can limit its ability to attract or acquire top engineering talent and better adapt the evolving needs of its users.

To submit a response to the poll mentioned above, navigate to its original post on Flip the Media.

So what keeps users engaged? Firstly, the app has make a good first impression and… actually work.  Secondly, the app has to help accomplish the goal of its user in a compelling way, whether it’s checking the weather, monitoring their bank account, sharing photos or browsing web content for entertainment.  But thirdly, beyond the basics, I’d wager to say that a touch a serendipity is key to creating a memorable user experience that keeps the user coming back.

Three mobile interactions that I had this week prompted me to make this observation:

• While at a Seattle Sounders match last Saturday (the local Major League soccer team), I decided to download and check out the franchise’s official app.  For the most part, the app’s content and functionality was a lot of what I had expected: Twitter feed integration to follow live coverage, details about the match, season schedule, roster, news, etc.  What I didn’t expect was a little feature called “Pulse” where users could press “Scarves Up,” to indicate that they were feeling positively about the game, or “Scarves Down,” to indicate their negative feeling about the game.  Once the user makes their selection, they are taken to a screen where they can view the 
  historical “Scarves Up/Down” ratio since the beginning of the match and can align the peaks and valleys with events that happen during the match like a yellow card, halftime, or a goal.  Through this simple voting feature on their phone, the app allows users (and fans) to connect with one another in support of their team and contribute to a broader mobile conversation about how the game is going.  Personally, I found myself checking pulse throughout the game just to see how an awful call by the ref or a dive influenced the audiences’ general consensus.

• I raved about task management iPhone app Clear in a post earlier this week.  But just yesterday, I managed to unlock a feature that has since made me appreciate the app even more.  It was late in the evening and I was building my agenda for the next day, seeing what tasks I still needed to complete and checking off the others that I had finished.  When I remove my first task, the app sent me a notification applauding me for getting things done so late in the night and awarding me with a free bonus theme (i.e. new color palette for my lists).  Not anything to write home about, but it’s nice to see these kind of Easter Eggs still hidden away in the mobile experiences.  It introduces a level of anticipation for using the app where the user is ready to be delighted or surprised.  While I’m already an avid Clear user, I’m looking forward to see what else its creators may have up their sleeves.

• I use Mint’s mobile app religiously to track my finances.  Please go check it out if you haven’t heard of it.  I’ll admit it does have a creep factor as you are essentially allowing third-party software a level of access to your banking information, but according to the research I’ve done it’s pretty safe –  at this point, I’ve been using it for over a year and have no complaints.  Anyways, Mint.com is great for tracking card purchases.  But in order to truly be a top mobile finance app for tracking money on the go, Mint needed to figure out how mobile users could account for out-of-pocket cash purchases as well.  What they came up with was a feature whereby you can manually log a cash purchase – say a cup of coffee for $3 that was left over from a $20 ATM withdrawal.  What’s also cool about this is that this manually entered cash payment is automatically deducted from your most recent cash withdrawal.  That is, the app would recognize that in this previous $3 purchase, you didn’t spend $23, but actually just $3 out of the $20 you already withdrew from you account.  The serendipitous element of all this is that the Mint app sucks in your GPS data when you manually entire a cash purchase.  When I did this last night on the University of Washington Campus, it recognized that most of the payments I make in this vicinity have been for on campus dinners and categorized it as such. Its guess was spot on and really made me feel like the app understood my habits and was going the extra mile to help me stay organized finances and save money.

I wanted to end with a quick observation about an app that has experienced a significant drop in engagement and whose recent success (and subsequent acquisition) is increasingly becoming seen as a “flash in the pan,” Draw Something.  During April 2012, daily average users for the mobile gaming app that was acquired by Zynga for $180M decreased by over 30% and continues this downward trend – all this after it was earned the tile of fastest growing mobile game ever.

Like many, I played quite a bit with friends when it was first released.  But now, I only play occasionally and the app’s notifications for unfinished games have become an annoyance.  Mindful that the app has release new features and upgrades in the last few week’s, they haven’t been enough to keep users coming back for more.  In this case, maybe there’s nothing the team can do to reverse the DAU trend -it is, after all, a simple peer to peer game like cards.  But Draw Something is a reminder that apps need to have a plan to keep their content and function fresh and relevant in order to keep users engaged.  Simple notifications reminding users that its “still there” offer little value in and of themselves.

What serendipitous moments have you discovered in the mobile apps that you use?

With a flat market share and under pressure from investors, the administrator of the world’s largest advertising budget announced it was eliminating 1,600 non-manufacturing jobs – many from the marketing department – and shifting to digital only initiatives “to contain media spending long-term.”

P&G Chairman and CEO Bob McDonald:

“In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that return on investment of the advertising when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient.” 

Interestingly enough, McDonald continued by pointing out that digital media’s largely free social distribution options could significantly drive down costs for the CPG manufacturer, citing the over 1.8B free impressions garnered by its break through “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign for Old Spice from 2010.

Many media theorists and market watchers know that digital isn’t really free despite what some execs profess. What’s important about McDonald’s statement is the indication that marketing executives view digital as a cost-saving channel powered by shared media and that is a job killer.

As consumers of media, we can only hope P&G’s move is in line with the macro-trend of brands shifting away from simply producing ads towards creating awesome, value-adding content.Seattle-based illustrator the Oatmeal recently published a clever “How to” in line with this trend, encouraging people to “put their energy into things that are likeable, not into – me douche social media strategy,” or in other words, “less marketing douchebaggery and more TANKS.”

So, was P&G’s move a cause for celebration for social media purists? Is it an affirmation that the advertising industry continues to evolve from “push” to “pull” strategies?

After interviewing a number of social media agencies of record (abbreviated as SMaoRs), web strategist Jeremiah Oywang has identified a new trend that suggests otherwise. With Facebook and Twitter releasing new ad units that transform popular social content into advertising units, social marketers (many of whom were set to disrupt the advertising industry) are vying with traditional agencies for larger shares of ad budgets.

As SMoaRs join the ad buying game and traditional agencies add social to their competencies, others view 2012 as the year of integration between ads and content. More marketers are making the case that the smart integration of “push” and “pull” strategies creates a whole communications strategy that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Nowhere is this happening more than in mobile, where second screens are enhancing the broadcast TV and branded apps are transforming retail into a networked platform experience.

For digital media professionals, this integration suggests that our future won’t necessarily be in a digital role at a traditional agency or working for a solely digital agency, but rather that qualifiers like these will no longer be relevant. Success will be measured in a company’s ability to market across any medium, channel, device, and audience and do it anytime, anywhere.

Even when the roles of social marketers and advertisers completely converge, consumers will ultimately determine the future of advertising.  Agencies and marketers only win when consumers are happy about the products and experiences being offered to them.  So, with an eye towards Facebook’s upcoming IPO which pins its financial success on its ability to generate ad revenue through its social network, there’s never been a more exciting – and challenging – time to be a digital marketer.

This blog was originally post on the Flip the Media blog.

Due – The problem with the native Reminders and Calendar apps for purpose of task management is that their a bit… slow.  The creator of Due (a 26-year old former journalist!) wanted to build something “really simple and fast,” citing that it generally accomplishes similar mobile list creation actions two to three times faster with one-third the number of steps required.  With Due, I can quickly set up a reminder to take my books to the library on Wednesday, and have the option to set snooze times, repeat alarms and reminder delays all within one-touch.  I generally use Due to set short-term reminders for things that are time sensitive instead of using it as a tradition “to do” bank — think of it almost as a sophisticated egg timer for your life.  But a heads up, Due is iPhone only and $4.99.

Clear – To do lists, whether or paper or on a digital notepad, can be kind of drab.  Clear for iPhone/iPod touch eliminates this issue with chutzpah.  The best way to describe clear is colorful and elegant.  The app takes full advantage of different gestural interactions to make building and managing individual list items as easy and as fun as Fruit Ninja.  The interface is gorgeous and it’s a real pleasure to use – the only bummer is that it’s not cloud-based (at least not yet), so that the lists your create aren’t accessible off of your mobile phone which is a must have for me if I want to not forget anything. That being said, right now, I general go to Clear for grocery lists, mundane to dos on the go or rapid fire task management. Clear is iOS only and available for $2.99 in the App Store.

Evernote – If you don’t know or use Evernote, you need to set yourself straight and go download it right now.  I think Evernote has single-handed revolutionized the way I take notes and brainstorm, not to mention introduced me to the whole “web clipping” concept.  The awesome-est thing about Evernote is that it syncs so seamlessly across all devices, so I’m taking notes on my phone at a meeting, reviewing them on my iPad later, and then flushing them out on my laptop in the evening.  But where Evernote is lacking for me is an easier checklist feature.  Right now, you have to insert check boxes in front of individual lines of texts to make them a “list,” much in the same way you would do on  a Word Document.  Evernote is free, but also offers a Premium version.

Wunderlist – in the early days of my search for a coveted cloud-based task manager, I stumbled across Wunderlust.  The app is beautifully designed with a nested list feature similar to Clear’s.  Wunderlist also features a corresponding desktop and tablet app that sync seamless like an Evernote.  So, in many ways, Wunderlust is Clear and Evernote’s love child, crafted by a bunch of German developers and designers.  Wunderlist is free and also available for Android and Windows desktop.

Trello – Just when you think you’ve tried all of the task management/productivity apps out there, along comes one that changes the GAME.  I should say that Trello is really a web-based task management application, but I was delighted to find that they also push it’s functionality to an elegantly made app.  Trello is great for simple to do lists, but even better for more sophisticated task management.  I can create “cards” or projects that can be nested under lists, but then I can also add variety of data like Due Dates, Facebook update-like comments, attachments, and meta-tags to the “back” of each card.  Through the Trello interface I can also invite others to share “boards” (groups of lists), assign people to certain cards, utilize a voting feature or share/print/export all the data on each individual card.  It’s pretty damn amazing and it offers a heck of a lot of value for… free.  A colleague of mine and I are currently managing a few projects with it and it’s looking like it’s going to take over my GTD workflow.

For more comprehensive task management systems (with endless bells and whistles) I hear OmniFocus is pretty good – have you tried it?  If so, let me know what you think in the comments below.

What other apps are you doing to GTD?

Slides created in collaboration with Darin Suthapong and Flair Li.

You can also watch a video of the app’s workflow (created by Darin) on Vimeo here.

Fortunately, the entrepreneurial among us are recognizing this need for easy ways to create mobile websites and have responded by building fast, easy, and cheap DIY tools that help even the most non-tech savvy out there publish on the mobile web. Here are two of such tools that I’ve come across this past week.

Landr

I discovered Landr while researching for the final project in my Mobile Development and Integration class in the MCDM.  The website allows users to “build simple, mobile landing pages,” each for $9/month to publish and host.  Users can select from a range of content modules including a logo’d header, image gallery, Twitter embed, video embed, RSS feed, and contact form. Landr also features modules more relevant for local businesses like work hours, deals, and a click to call button. Users are welcome to build and preview their mobile landing pages for free and are charged once they choose to publish their landing page.  When published, Landr hosts your page on a domain custom to your username, automatically generates an associated QR code, and also offers the options to redirect custom domains and embed Google Analytics tracking code. Pretty cool, eh?

The ease with which I set up and launched a page with Landr blew me away.  In less than fifteen minutes, my class group managed to build a prototype landing page for our client (view it online here), which really helped bring to life our developing strategy.  While the functionality of Landr’s DIY website is ultimately limited to the content modules offered, users who are more tech savvy can edit the page’s CSS to their liking.

Zapd

Zapd is actually the brainchild of a team I formerly shared an office with here in Seattle.  The iPhone/iPad apps bills itself as allowing users to create as many instant, themed websites, or “Zaps” as their called, straight from their mobile device and all for free.  Unlike Landr that provides an online tool for creating mobile websites, Zapd provides a mobile tool that allows users to create dynamic websites optimized for mobile, tablet and desktop.  As the Zapd website claims, “we do the hosting, you provide the creativity.” Pitched as a great way to promote anything from a user’s favorite photos to their small business, Zaps, once published, can be shared to Twitter and Facebook and changed at anytime.

It’s a sign of these “mobile-first” times that we’ve evolved from building mobile-optimized websites to building mobile tools that create websites on the go.  “We’re trying to demonstrate a glimpse into the future of web publishing,” says CEO Kelly Smith in a TechCrunch article last year. “It will start from your phone. Not the other way around.”

Similar to creating a landing page with Landr, creating a Zap was effortless.  (You can view mine, which I created in, yes, under 30 seconds here.)  For now, Zapd only offers three options – text, photo, link – that would be the equivalent to the content modules features offered by Landr, although I don’t think these two are necessarily competing products.  Yes, they both offer cheap ways to build mobile-optimized properties, but, with Landr, I see its use case living strictly within the bounds of small business promotions while I see Zapd serving more personal, creative uses.

With products like Landr and Zapd (and I’m sure a laundry list of others that are similar), there’s really no reason why a company (or even an individual) with even the smallest of budgets can’t be optimized for the mobile web.

What other DIY tools for the mobile web have you come across recently?

Enter Summly, an app (currently available on iPhone only) that uses semantic analysis to instantly summarize web content into a more digestible format, specifically for mobile.  Summly, remarkably founded by a 16 year old schoolboy from London, aims to create a simpler way to search the web and more concise and efficient content consumption.   The patent-pending technology the powers Summly uses a combination of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and ontology techniques to enable the user to quickly determine if a particular shared link is worth reading.  Oh, and it’s free.

I’ve used Summly a number of times over the past week and it’s impressive, although the summaries can come off as a bit robotic.  Using Summly has quickly become a regular mobile media habit for me along with Pocket and I can see a lot of folks adopt this app as people continue to seek time-savings ways to consume content on the go.

But I also may have mentioned that, until recently, Pocket was known as Read It Later. Just last week, the makers of Read It Later renamed the application to coincide with a new release and overhaul of its visual interface. Over the last few months, the Read It Later team had been letting users know an upgrade was “coming soon,” so given my recently heightened awareness of all things mobile, I decided to play the “dumb user” and analyze the rebranding’s rollout.

Rebrandings, whether for an esteemed one-hundred year old consumer packaged good or a mobile app, can revitalize a stagnant brand and make it more relevant to contemporary audiences. But these undertakings also come at the risk of irritating long-time fans and decreasing brand loyalty. In the case of Read It Later and mobile apps in general, this means possibly confusing and losing users if the rebranding launch interfered too much with the user experience.

Unexpectedly, I first found out that the rebranding rollout had begun by reading about it on a tech blog – despite being an avid user of the app. Curious to see how much time would elapse between reading this and when i would actually see the update, I held off from immediately downloading the new version from the App Store (even though I was pretty tempted by its slick new look).

Predictably, the “Upgrade Now” alert within the app came within a few days but, interestingly enough, the upgrade link directed me to the App Store to download a wholly separate app instead of directing me to App Store updates. After reading through the small print, I found that the app had not only launched a new visual interface and new features, but that the developers had pivoted their entire business model.

Whereas Read It Later had a free version and a paid PRO versions (for $2.99), Pocket eliminated the tiered pricing and made the app available for free to all. PRO users received the Upgrade as an App Store Update, but free subscribers (of which I was one) had to download a wholly new and separate application. This created a hot second of confusion when I saw both Read It Later and Pocket in the App Store simultaneously, but I imagine options are limited for developers in these situations.

Use Your Existing Read It Later Account with Pocket: If you’re a Read It Later PRO user, you’ll get Pocket with our latest app update. (Read It Later Free users, you will need to download the new Pocket app separately.) Once the app is installed, getting started is easy: If already have a Read It Later account, just sign in to Pocket with that. Your saved content will be right there waiting for you.

Aside from this requirement, the technical upgrades transferred seamlessly to the newly minted Pocket app. Users could simply log into Pocket using their Read It Later account info and all of their data would be synced. The online bookmarklet and browser plug-in worked the same – the users did not have to update anything else.

Anecdotally, I found the new look much cleaner and easier to use, an opinion with which it appears most other users seem to agree. The rebranding also added a new bulk uploading feature which enabled users to tag and better organize the content they “pocket” – an noteworthy development considering that Pocket could later use this data to suggest content to users down the road. Lastly, perhaps the most significant change was to the app’s name, “Pocket.” The language describing the app’s rebranding emphasized its multimedia ability, that is the ability to “pocket” images and videos. This simply name change appears to be a play to prepare the app’s brand for bigger and better things down the road.

Overall, aside from the unavoidable point of confusion in the Upgrade process, I give the Pocket team kudos for a rebranding that has obviously been worked over for months. To current users, the alert of the Upgrade could of happened sooner, but ultimately the upgrade wasn’t critical to the app’s functionality. To new users, Pocket doesn’t appear to have quite the Page Rank it needs for search engine visibility (“Pocket App” top search result is an unrelated mobile development firm in the UK), but with the recent coverage of the rebranding, I’m sure this will change as the app sees a spike in installations.

“The photos you take on Instagram are owned by you,” stressed co-founder Kevin Systrom during a SXSW panel on mobile photography last month,  “they’re always going to be owned by you.”

In what can be considered a subtle jab at Facebook, well before any acquisition talks, Systrom underscored one of Instagram’s perceived differentiating benefits: its refreshingly clear terms of service that claim no ownership rights to the content shared on its platform – “perceived” because, in reality, Instagram’s image rights closely resembles those of Facebook, although the latter’s remain less clear.

Instagram:

Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post on or through the Instagram Services. By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly (“private”) will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.

Facebook:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

I think it’s worth putting into context here the relative volume of photos of the two social networks: Facebook has 170 billion photos – the largest online repository of photos in history – while Instagram has 500 million with 60-90 uploaded per second worldwide.

So while dumping Instagram for another photo sharing app may not solve your privacy issues, the new relationship has been enough for many users to delete their profiles and switch to alternatives out of privacy concerns.  While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists that Instagram will develop independently, his company’s murky track record with user data has some Instagram lovers assuming the worst. Will Zuck run facial recognition on your hip, Sierra filtered images?  Will you have to use a Facebook log-in to access you Instagram account?  Will Facebook’s social graph absorb your historical geo-tagging data from Instagram?

The good thing is that if you are looking for alternatives, you will find no shortage of them. Instagram has been merely a front-runner in a robust and burgeoning app category (industry?) where there’s now officially a photo-sharing app for everything.

Here are four photo-sharing apps that will help you fill the void in your life if or when you choose to abandon your well-documented Instalife.

Camera+ is not simply just another photo-sharing app for the iPhone (4 stars).  No, Camera+ is a camera replacement app for times when you need to do more than simply slap a Valencia filter on an image of your dog.  The app, available for $1.99 in the App Store, features an impressive number of modes and effects including a lock focus, stabilizer mode, and a burst feature that let’s you continuously take photos as you hold down the camera button.  And, of course, there are filters: 36 of them!  While you can link to your external accounts like Facebook and Twitter to share photos, Camera+ lacks its own social network functionality.

PicPlz allayed my Instagram-envy when I owned a Droid X.  Interestingly enough, PicPlz launched before Instagram as an app to make sharing mobile photos as streamlined and as seamless as possible (both are also funded by Andreessen-Horowitz).  The app only added filters after it was clear that the market wanted it.  Available on both iPhone (4 stars) and Android (4 stars), PicPlz creates a web profile for each of its users, captures how many views each posted photos receives, and can instantly back up original, unfiltered copies of photos to Dropbox – all features that help PicPlz differentiate itself from Instagram.

Hipstamatic, named 2010 app of the year by Apple, has long been mentioned as a front-runner in the photo-sharing app category alongside Instagram (an interesting post on why Hipstamatic is not a $1 billion companyhere).  Also only available on iPhone (4 stars), Hispamatic describes itself as an app that returns the “beloved look, feel, and unpredictable beauty of toy cameras” to mobile photography with a fun faux-analog interface. But while Hipstamatic users create images that appear similar to Instagrams, that’s where the similarities end. Although Hipstamic was first to market with the filter effect, it purposefully chose not to pursue becoming a network and instead focused on monetization through app sales, extra features and advertising.  Oddly enough, Hipstamatic announced a partnership with Instagram just two weeks before the Facebook acquisition, allowing its users to port their photos directly into Instagram’s network, the first time a third-party received access to the Instagram API.  Hisptamatic costs $1.99 to download and also offers HipstaPacks with additional features starting at $0.99.

EyeEm is a free “sharing & discovery” app, available on both iPhone (4 ½ star) and Android (4 star), that connects you with like-minded people through the photos you take.  Among EyeEm’s advantage over Instagram are features that help users find photos that interest them. Users can subscribe to themed albums like “Bikes,” “Geometry,” and “Dancing” and can add tags for events, locations, and other interests.  EyeEm also provides a live filter that allows a user to see what their edited photo will look like before the snap it.  EyeEm’s community is obviously not as big as Instagram’s, but downloads and installs have picked up significantly in the last 30 days.  For now, EyeEm bests Instagram in its ability to curate interesting photos for users, but Instagram has made it known that this is a functionality they’re developing.

Of course, the list of alternatives doesn’t stop here. There’s a rapidly growing market of apps that capture and share mobile photos in unique and creative ways – check out Hipster, LightBox, Cinemagram, Plxr-O-Matic, Retro Camera, Popset, and others.

And if your first priority is deleting your Instagram account before considering alternatives, there are apps for that too like Instaport,Copygram, and InstaBackup (coming soon to the Mac App Store).

What other mobile photography apps do you use?  Has the Facebook acquisition changed you Instagram habits?  Share in the comments below.

I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight four QR code instances that I’ve run into in the last week.

Yogurtland – The frozen yogurt franchise ran a QR promotion through the Seattle-based daily deal startup Pirq in the UW student newspaper last week. Although the ad, pictured below, makes FREE yogurt seem as easy as 1, 2, 3, the code actually directed you to either Apple or Android’s app store to download the Pirq app – even if you already had the app on your phone. It turns out the promotion wasn’t so much for free yogurt as it was for Pirq itself, although the Yogurtland deal had topped out by the time I saw this.

RE/MAX – I had heard that realtors were putting QR codes on “For Sale” signs, but only noticed this for the first time in my neighborhood last week. The code directs you to mobile optimized website ofthe local RE/MAX agent where you can view a few of the feature properties in the area, but ironically none of these were the house that the signed was promoting. Furthermore, the mobile site didn’t provide a click to call number, but only featured links that redirected you to their desktop website.

MelisssaData – I saw this code in a marketing software magazine that I received at work. You’d think that folks in the marketing automation industry would know better than to redirect a user to a non-mobile website, but you’d be wrong. Instead, the QR code directed users to its desktop website where they can download a white paper, unfortunately having to pinch and zoon to complete the fields. Also, downloading PDF white papers doesn’t exactly seem like the best task to complete on a mobile device, does it? It’d probably be best to offer users to email them a link with the paper to open a later time.

Corndog on corndog – What turned out to be the most useless QR code was also the most entertaining. This one was posted near that bar at a local pub, presumably targeting the folks standing in line waiting to order. Users are directly to a simple mobile website with an image of two corndogs and some mustard on a plate. Oh, and a banner ad. I hope that someone, somewhere has posted these all over the country and is making money off of this. After all, I’ve returned to the site three or four times just to show my friends – that’s got to be pulling some revenue for the site’s publisher, right?

Also worth sharing is this slide from our prof’s most recent class lecture of heinous QR code campaigns.

How about you? What are some of the noteable QR code fails that you’ve seen recently?