Instagram-owner Facebook emits in-house camera app

Facebook has launched a new Instagram-like mobile camera app via Apple's iTunes store.

The social network, which inelegantly plonked itself on the Nasdaq a week ago, said in April that it planned to buy photo-sharing startup Instagram in a $1bn cash-and-stock deal.

Observers considered the proposed buyout of that app to be a defensive move by Facebook. Now it turns out that the site's engineers had been beavering away at their own in-house version of an online photo-sharing application for months.

The free app, brashly dubbed Facebook Camera, landed on Apple's online software store yesterday.

One of the neatest things about the app is that users can share multiple photos on Facebook rather than having to post them one by one. It also has a photo editor bundled in. And yes, just like Instagram, Facebook Camera offers photo filters.

This is the latest app released by Facebook for the iPhone and comes off the back of its wobbly initial public offering (IPO). Ahead of that, the web biz had disclosed that it hadn't pulled in any revenue from the nascent mobile market.

That's a fact which undoubtedly affected Facebook's subdued IPO.

Its CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed earlier this week in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing that he had offloaded 30.2 million shares in his company at $37.58 a pop, earning the Facebook co-founder about $1.1bn - a move that led some critics to suggest that the 28-year-old boydroid was cashing in some of his chips before Facebook's stock dwindled.

Zuck will spend most of that money, however, on a gigantic tax bill.

Meanwhile, Facebook stock appears to be stubbornly sticking to about $32 to $33 a piece. And, a week on, Zuckerberg has been greeted with a variety of lawsuits from angry shareholders who claim the Facebook boss failed to warn investors of the company's stuttering growth forecast. ®

Zucknote

Apparently, Zuckerberg's miffed mob of shareholders have coined the term "zucked" to explain exactly how they feel about the young copper-haired Web 2.0 adman.

It's The Register's duty to point out that this scribe used that term way back in December to describe how Facebook's users had been "zucked dry".