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Ryan Hoover

Boomerang by Instagram - Create and share 1-second video loops

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Capture moving photo loops with Boomerang by Instagram. It captures 10 pictures, smoothens them out and there you go, you have the perfect, moving back and forth, mini GIF of the moment that will never end. Have fun with your friends creating amazing GIFs and share them on your social media.

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Ryan Hoover
Hunter
Hyperlapse, Layout, and now Boomerang. Instagram is building an ecosystem of photo/video-based apps. Check out @joshconstine's writeup on TechCrunch and here's their video:
I'm downloading it now. :) UPDATE: my first Boomerang
Chris Messina
Top Hunter
@rrhoover this app is so millennial. The product video is all young people. The competition for the attention of the youth market (aka the future) is enormous.
Pierre-Marie Galite
@chrismessina @rrhoover It's all about "me" and less about "you".
Kamil
@rrhoover Very cool!
Ross Currie
@rrhoover Really interesting what you were saying about building the ecosystem of photo/video-based apps. Someone just posted in MakerHunt the other day an article related to how side projects are a new form of marketing. Buffer releasing the social media resizer this past week being a perfect example. I was just thinking to myself this morning about the fact that Instagram hadn't yet gone this route.
Ryan Hoover
Hunter
@mikeyk - I just made my first Boomerang and like your other "side" apps (Hyperlapse and Layout), you've built a super simple onboarding flow without a signup hurdle. Well done. Where'd the idea for Boomerang come from?
Mike Krieger
Top Product
Maker
@rrhoover similar to Hyperlapse, actually--a small group of engineers at one of our hackathons stayed up all night and built a demo, we were excited enough to see it through the door. It uses some of the same stabilization tech as Hyperlapse on iOS, too
Kevin
It's like a combination of PHHHOTO and Live Photos
Christian Blomberg
@kevinayuque was just thinking the same.
Tiger Wang ☻
@kevinayuque Phhhoto killer, diplo is going to be mad
Jonathan Kupferman
Instagram is really nailing these small utility apps that feed back into their main app (and facebook). The very minimal intro is great. It's basically just permission dialogues and you are good to go. - It's interesting that they always immediately save it to your camera roll, no prompt or anything. In my experience with photo apps people delete/don't save the result quite often (a majority of the time). Then again you can always clean up your camera roll later. - I like that they are short but to me it feels a little *too short*. I found myself struggling to do something interesting within that one second. Capturing something with movement often meant I had to move myself (or the camera) so fast that it became blurry/jerky. - It's funny that in order for the videos to be long enough to post on Instagram (with their 3 second minimum) they had to take the one-second loop, reverse it and then play that twice to get to 4 seconds.
Mike Krieger
Top Product
Maker
@jkupferman the repeated also helps with making sure the iOS and Android video players/loopers can handle it properly. When the video is too short we found we'd get more stutters.
Owen Williams
Cool app, but feels like it's been sherlocked by Apple's Live Photos just before it was released.
Mike Krieger
Top Product
Maker
@ow curious why you think so--I've found they have very different use cases. Boomerang is high-intent, Live Photos (to me so far at least) have been nice bonuses on existing photos, but I don't find myself staging Live Photos intentionally
Carylyne Chan
@ow That was exactly what I was thinking when I saw it. Especially since Live Photos makes the loops endemic to photo taking on the phone now, this seems to have slightly less value. Though I think @mikeyk's explanation of intent makes sense - it's probably just that it's easier to share on the platform than the simple function of having a 1-sec loop on any photo?
Ghost Kitty
Comment Deleted
Josh Puetz
Yup, this seems just like Phhhoto, but thankfully with the ability to save and share loops. Couple of issues: - no filters :( - no built in way to save movie as a gif
Tim Lenardo
@joshpuetz Hey - I'm the engineer that originally built Boomerang as a hackathon project. Some thoughts: - Plenty of filters in Instagram :) - Gif felt limiting/fragmented. Few platforms support Gifs (IG included), and the viewing experience changes platform to platform (Facebook vs. Imgur, etc). Videos, on the other hand, are universally supported with a pretty consistent viewing experience. Also, there are plenty of video-to-gif conversion apps 👍
Agnieszka
@telenardo @joshpuetz Seriously, you've built it as a hackathon project ;O? Thought it has been building from scratch for a weeks by a group of developers ;)
Tim Lenardo
@aga_jaskiewicz @joshpuetz Build a demo during a hackathon -> got the company excited about it -> staffed up the project -> spent a few weeks building a polished product.
Agnieszka
@telenardo @joshpuetz OK, now I got it ;)
Katrina Huang
@joshpuetz if you like boomerang, you should try RLY. It's a fairly new app that turns live photos or short videos into looping reels, so kind of like gifs. RLY is it's own social media platform, but the app makes it very easy to download your posts and share across other platforms. I've been using it for a bit and I love it so far!
Joel Patrick
1 second!? Seems... succinct. Will be interesting to see what people make.
Amanda Hill
Looks like IG is feeling pressure from giphy.
Shashwat Pradhan
Really like the Instagram side apps, @mikeyk wish Instagram had better developer relations/support people and a more powerful API.
Genuine Jack
Adios Phhhoto! we hardly knew ye
Kyle Kesterson
Fun app, dead simple and will bring some life into the feed. Of course I can't wait to see how creative people get with it, pushing it beyond initial vision. One thing I'd really really love to see Instagram evolve to, is more immersive storytelling. The feature they release only to sponsors for multi-pic swipe would really help create narratives and context. Stellar Stories does this really well, but requires more thought in creation. My assumption is multi-pic posts would skyrocket number of photos posted, and engagement both in creation and consumption. @mikeyk If this isn't on the roadmap for public release, is there a good reason for it, perhaps in what you've learned from sponsor usage and engagement?
Christopher Leach
This looks really cool, it's bound to happen someone makes an app that turns videos into Live Photos and I feel these would be cool to make into Live Photos
Malcolm Bell
Blink and you miss it!
Ola King
This is pretty fun! I'm excited to see the creative things that people will make with this. I guess our attention span is about to get even shorter lol
Thanasis
Nice and minimal ui! Congrats!
Nicholas Sheriff
@mikeyk This is interesting guys...Mike what was the inspiration behind this? Is 1 sec gif's just more like an mvp iteration ( inspiration you mentioned was from a hackathon session I can imagine more brilliance is going into this later )... what's the value add with the current version against other stand alone applications...what are your thoughts on the value add of additional creative layers onto gifs... Oh when will you guys have api write access ;) who do I have to send a "y u no" tshirt to Mike?
Jeremy Zykorie
This is fun because it is so easy to use. Removed almost all friction. That said, I do not like the automatic save to the camera roll. I did lots of deleting already.
David Singer
Never thought we'd see Vine become longform...
Divyansh Patel
Fantastic app!! The time period is very short! It's annoying when I create a boomerang and don't want to save it! There's no option to delete it. The user has to delete it from the camera roll/gallery.