Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

Hipstamatic launching standalone photo-sharing app, Oggl

Francis Bea
By
oggl

Hipstamatic is still around, alive and kicking, and in a press conference today, its founders announced the launch of a standalone social photo-sharing app for iOS it calls Oggl.

As with most photo-sharing apps, Oggl and Instagram could be cousins. It also shares some similarities with Flickr, and a Hipstimatic’s spokesperson describes it as a “place for like-minded, creative people who use photography as a way to connect with their inner artist.” While Instagram surely has a hold on the mobile-meets-photo-meets-social market, Flickr’s long-standing reputation with creatives and artists as well as its recent upgrade do give it some clout (although you could argue the addition of Aviary filters may have hurt how seriously it’s taken by photographers). 

Recommended Videos

Regardless, Oggl solves the problem of Hipstamatic’s very absent social features. Photos snapped and filtered through the Hipstamatic photo app end up on external platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr. Keeping content in-house means more in-app engagement, and of course opens up the doors to a number of monetization opportunities for an app that’s free to download.

Related

Oggl sports a “point-and-shoot” camera called Capture, and uses “Hipstamatic’s beautiful lenses and films.” There are five different types of free thematic lenses and films to choose from including Food, Nightlife, and Sunset, among others. You get a handful of these for free, but to access the full catalog of lenses and films, Oggl asks for $0.99 per month.

It’s curious to find Hipstamatic branching off with a new platform altogether instead of just introducing a dashboard or news feed that would tie users content into a stream. But Hipstimatic explains that it wanted to keep its original app the same for those that preferred it that way. “It was important for us to keep the original Hipstamatic experience for our community members who will always use and love it.”

It’s a nice sentiment, but what about the possibility of Oggl cannibalizing Hipstamatic’s existing user base? A point-and-shoot style camera is far quicker and convenient to use than Hipstamatic. But the team remains optimistic: “This is not competitive with our Hipstamatic app, but instead Oggl offers a new way to experience Hipstamatic’s beautifully crafted filters.”

Oggl’s “Curate” feature is what makes the app social. Each user has a profile page alongside a section titled “My Collection,” which displays all the photos that you’ve added yourself or curated from other users. Those of you looking for quality content will find a section called the “Curated Editorial Feeds” that’s hand-curated by Hipstamatic and participating photographers.

When Instagram’s acquisition was announced, rather than bowing out of the photo-filter game, Hipstamatic took an unconventional approach by reimagining the company into something of a lifestyle brand. Under its wing, Hipstamatic owns PrintLab, Incredibooth, and its digital publication Snap Magazine alongside its two photo apps. Its user base isn’t comparably remarkable, with just four million users, but that’s still nothing to sneeze at, and its community remains incredibly loyal and tuned-in. 60 million photos are taken each month, and a total of two billion photos since have been snapped to date.

Oggl hasn’t officially launched yet, but antsy Hipstimatic fans can sign up for early access through this link as the beta testing wraps up, but the app could be available as early as the end of the week.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Francis Bea
Francis Bea
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Francis got his first taste of the tech industry in a failed attempt at a startup during his time as a student at the…
LinkedIn launches standalone personal assistant app, LinkedIn Contacts

A personal assistant in your pocket is one way of thinking about LinkedIn’s new and third standalone app, LinkedIn Contacts, which launched today. 
LinkedIn is figuring quickly that the omnipresence of a mobile app can offer far more to professionals than the Web can. And for busy business-types that don’t already have an assistant, it’s always nice to have a sidekick to tell you what meeting you should be at or how you know the person you’re about to meet.
Of course, LinkedIn Contacts isn’t exactly Siri - this isn't an AI-powered app that you can chat with that you can ask questions of; it's more an address book with networking capabilities. LinkedIn Contacts pulls your contacts from your address book, email accounts, and calendars, and acts as a manager for all of this information. Other sources that LinkedIn pulls from include CardMunch, LinkedIn’s standalone business scanning app, Evernote, TripIt, Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, and of course LinkedIn.
This is part of the more active approach LinkedIn has recently been taking. By making moves in becoming a mobile platform for managing your contacts, there is no doubt that time spent on the app is bound to grow. 
Once you’ve synced up your contacts, on the desktop version of the app, your email, mobile, Evernote, or whatever platform you use to save your contact’s information, everything is stored on LinkedIn. The neat thing about LinkedIn is that all of these contacts show up in one place, and the app offers a powerful filter to sort through your growing little black book. On the mobile app you can even jot down notes about them and how you met. On top of this, there’s a tab partitioned for all notes that you’ve added to your To-Do list, and another for the calendar. These tabs aren’t available on the desktop app, however.

What’s particularly useful about the app is the availability of a timeline that lists important interactions with each contact on both desktop and mobile. You'll even find a list of the most recent emails that you can tap open inside of LinkedIn. It’s a clever reminder about how you met that person, and you don’t even have to lift a finger since the details about your relationship are aggregated automatically.
LinkedIn Contacts has a ways to go before it’ll be accepted for its intended use as a personal assistant, but it's an interesting first step into the arena. 

Read more
Facebook’s secret iPhone photo-sharing app leaked
iphone-4-650

Facebook has a secret iPhone app in development, and it's totally "killer," reports MG Seigler at TechCrunch. The new app from the social network kingdom is like nothing anybody's seen before -- at least not all in one place. And with any luck, it'll be on your iPhone or other iOS device sometime in nearby future. According to Seigler, who received "roughly 50 MB of images and documents outlining the entire thing," the app is like a combination of a bunch of other popular photo-sharing apps all thrown together. "The best way to think about it," says Seigler, "appears to be Path meets Instagram meets Color meets (Path’s new side project) With — with a few cool twists." Whew! That description may be more than most people can process. But unfortunately, that's the best Seigler can do at the moment. And since he's still sifting through the massive cache of data he was handed on this classified project, we don't yet know a ton about the specific features. But let's make a few guesses based on what we do know, shall we?For starters, Facebook's app seems to only include photo-sharing functionality (though Seigler says it's possible that it could be later integrated with the full Facebook app), which is similar to the picture-centric social network of Path. Chances are this app will, like Path, make it extremely easy to share photos with friends. And the photos will likely appear in a linear fashion, like they do in Path. The best part of Instagram is, of course, the ability to quickly and easily edit photos to look cool. This is also a hot feature in the popular Camera+ app. So we expect some sort of in-app photo editing. The Color connection could mean that photos taken by anyone around you appear in a public stream in the app — a feature that could, once again, outrage privacy advocates. And With, which is all about taking pictures with other people, basically stole its idea from Facebook's tagging, so it's no surprise there are similarities there. As the app is still very much in development, so there isn't yet a release date, or anything else even close to a concrete fact. But Seigler says there is "a lot more" to come, so stay tuned.

Read more
Color photo-sharing app takes social networking to an amazing, terrifying new place
color-photo-sharing-app

Brand new public photo-sharing app Color has the potential to be the coolest — or the most frightening — social media platform yet.

Launched Wednesday night for iPhone and Android, Color is the brainchild of Bill Nguyen, who sold his music-streaming company Lala to Apple in 2009 for $80 million. At first glance, Color might seem like a copycat of mobile apps like Instagram or PicPlz. But with a proximity-based sharing functionality, it holds far greater potential.

Read more