Buying instagram was a brilliant move. It's a far more enjoyable social network to use. Lately I've gotten into a scene that's basically a parallel universe where facebook doesn't exist. Everyone uses instagram. It's far more entertaining and creative, and far less saturated with anger and activism. I've dialed back my facebook activity heavily in the past year, to the point that I've deleted the facebook app. I have messenger and the facebook events app, but the losing the news feed has been no loss at all.
I can see a future, not even very far away, where facebook is essentially the AOL of our generation and having an account there is a punchline.
That future is already here. I asked my 13 year old sister and her friend if they were on Facebook, and they both laughed and did an old person imitation of me! I couldn't believe it.
This may be one of the biggest reasons Instagram was purchased by Facebook. It's a hedge against Facebook's potential to go the way of AOL and MySpace.
There's a lot of spam on instagram. Try posting anything related to fitness and you'll get " awesome" and "️" from every beauty, gymwear and supplement brand.
I love the semianonymity; I have a (very) expensive hobby and I can unashamedly share photos with other people with the same hobby without worrying about the social blowback from doing it on Facebook
I admire Mark Zuckerberg's confidence to pull the trigger on an acquisition like this, especially doing it without consulting his board. My initial thoughts was that he has a visceral feel for the rate of growth that makes a social network successful, having gone through it himself. He could probably tell just by their publicity of growing to a million users within 2-3 months that they were going to be huge.
Facebook had a great deal of insight into Instagram's growth due to Facebook Connect. They could see internally how many people were signing up for Instagram, how many people from their networks they were inviting and connecting with, and other indicators of activity.
Notable that the number one comment in that thread references Google/YouTube. And that it worked for being "mostly left alone." Surprising that Google has never repeated that trick, that I'm aware of. Seems they mostly acquire and let die. (Curious if they tried that with YouTube, but it had already passed a threshold?)
The real genius is, he left it alone and gave it autonomy. That in contrast to Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo that can't seem to resist the allure of 'synergy'.
I bet most people don't even know Instagram is owned by facebook.
Dumb question, but what is it about Instagram that made it so huge?
Snapchat I actually get, since it's presenting a new kind of communication model. Facebook I get. But Instagram is just like any old image gallery, with a very rudimentary comment system and almost no features unrelated to image uploading.
I agree with what everyone else has responded with about what makes instagram so huge, but there is something else that made it popular:
You only upload 1 photo.
True, someone can dump a lot of photos one at a time, but I think that's a bit of an instagram faux pas. It tends to be that if someone is on vacation (for instance) they don't dump all their photos on instagram, they choose their one best photo, crop it, add a filter to it, and try to make it great. You don't create an album like you do on facebook. This makes the quality of what you see in your feed a lot higher than what you would see on facebook. I've been told by a few heavy users of instagram that this is what they love about it.
Instagram was the first app of its kind to make phone cameras social.
At the time, about the only thing you could do with pictures you took with your phone was sync.
Instagram was released at a critical moment in history when phone cameras were starting to get good and cellular Internet was starting to get fast enough to reliably upload them.
You can't look at the landscape today and ask "Why is instagram popular?". You have to look at it in its historical context.
The most distinctive thing about IG to me is that it is a 'safe space for narcissism'.
I agree with the other posters on Instagram's features leading to a lower volume of higher quality content.
The UI makes the app very much about sharing photos you've taken, making content about things you have done not things you have seen on the web. And the app lets you know that those things should be beautiful. By default profiles are public, making content production more selective, and content discovery less based on personal connections.
What's most interesting to me is how the product shaped the cultural norms on the service.
If Facebook is the lowest-friction/highest-distribution place to share what's going on inside your head, IG is the place for leisure choices as identity. There's not a range of reactions, because everything on the service should be an expression of individual pleasure.
Many posts and feeds seem to focus on conspicuous, aspirational consumption (apparel, beauty products, cocktails, destinations, art galleries, etc.). It was a very smart choice for an ad-network.
Why is Hacker news so popular, with its rudimentary comment system? The user community.
Instagram became popular with the right celebrities at the right time - someone internal to the company no doubt has the user acquisition timeline and has worked out who the "patient zero" was. This sparked a wave of people joining to follow them and has effectively supplanted OK! magazine and similar. Just have a look at the most popular accounts:
Filters were a relatively new thing. It was executed so well that any crap photo was instantly turned into a piece of art without needing any special skill or experience. Other apps had (and still has) filters, but they looked kinda lame. They feel like an afterthought.
The sharing and social factor was built in. Take a photo and sharing was automatic, which is pretty neat.
The name was also a huge factor. Photo Filter App 2.0 wouldn't have cut it.
I think that it's a case where fewer features is a benefit. It's a very mobile-focused platform, where adding tons of features tends to be more confusing than helpful. Do few things and do them well.
It's probably also a case-study in how to market social networks. Get the right people on at the right time, so people want to get on and follow them, and then post their own content.
For me and a lot of my friends the increased popularity of Instagram is entirely about how we hate Facebook but don't want to abandon our FB connections.
So we use IG as our primary way to say hello, send an update, and register a Like. And then we go on FB when we have more time, or want to share a link, or whatever. But this is less and less common, judging by the relative activity I see on IG vs FB for my own connections. (And even a lot of the regular FB users are cross-posting all their photos now.)
As such it's not that great a photo-sharing UI, but it works and it doesn't require Yet Another Social Graph.
I don't know how much this is a factor in IG's continued growth in the face of Snapchat -- after all I'm talking about a cohort 30 and older. But my gut tells me it's significant.
I used Instagram when it first came out as a way to put filters on my photos, I didn't realize it was posting to a social network until 6 months later.
The one thing that bothers me more than it should is that their image viewing totally sucks.
You can't enlarge an image you're viewing. Designed for mobile first, yet the size you view an image at is tied to whatever size your phone screen is. Why? I'm sure the image they are sending over the wire isn't at all as small as your screen, so why restrict it like that?
> Dumb question, but what is it about Instagram that made it so huge?
I'd like to think the quality of their app has something to do with it. Unlike almost every mobile app I use, it's a joy to use (Android version). It's always snappy (this is huge), things always flow well, there is a ton of little detail functionality in there but it never overwhelms.
It's also great to see people's posts for a location you've tagged in your shot and compare their experience to yours. Or just find them. I know no other social network that does this so well.
It's the only social network I've stuck with and gotten any joy out of.
The purchase of instagram was a pre-IPO move to prop up Facebooks offering as a mobile company before their core product had actually transitioned. Investors major question was if FB could transition from desktop to mobile at the time, and Mark needed something to back that up. Mark had been quite vocal about Facebooks guesses around mobile, html5, apps and how he needed to reorganize the product teams but couldn't get the story together in time. Thus instagram.
The logic in both the article and most of the comments seems to utterly forget the context of which FB was in at the time.
I hate the way Instagram allows people to sign up and use the service without verifying the email address they used to sign up with. I'm assuming this is the case after someone used my email to create a profile on Instagram.
I started receiving notification emails from Instagram a few weeks ago, which I ignored at first thinking they were fake. On closer inspection they actually were from Instagram, so I clicked "forgot password" on the Instagram website, reset their password, logged in and deleted all their content and permanently deleted their account. By the looks of it, the profile belonged to some kid - a few family photos and so on.
It's quite slack of Instagram that this is possible. They should not be allowing people to create profiles and use the service before first verifying the email address used to sign up with. I guess basic verification is trumped by the need for "active users" to motivate these "stroke of genius" articles.
I still don't understand why Instagram took off, and I'm a millennial. You could already post pictures to Facebook when it came out. What advantage did Instagram offer over Facebook? Filters? I just don't understand my peers and I don't understand this industry sometimes.
A lot of people ask why Instagram took off and get a lot of different answers; I think that's the beauty of it.
I wasn't much of an Instagram user for a long time until I started getting into photography. I'm still a total photography noob, but now my feed of pictures is a combination of friends and amazing photographers that serve as inspiration. I deleted my Facebook account a couple months ago and haven't looked back. Whereas I spent time on Facebook scrolling through vitriol, my time on Instragram is a constant stream of friends lives and beautiful pictures.
I've realized a shallow social network is all the social network I need.
Live video will be bigger on instagram than would be on facebook, snapchat or periscope. It is way more easy, fast and better looking than any other app that do live video IMO.
They only need to make a better discovery option than the "Follow someone".
I was in San Francisco when this deal was announced, and I still remember all my supposedly "tech startup savvy" friends mocking Zuckerberg for buying a company with no revenue for a billion dollars. And yes, this group even included a Harvard MBA grad pursuing a career in entrepreneurship. It's no coincidence that this was the same group of people who also mocked Facebook's IPO valuation of ~$70B as proof that we were in a bubble. If there's one thing I learned from that experience, it's that people have no idea how to appraise high-growth high-potential ventures.
People going to Instagram to escape their existing Facebook connections. Starting a new graph on Instagram that is restricted to their current and more private interests. What I've observed.
I'm doing art as a career after my comp sci degree and instagram is just perfect for me. The fact that instagram is pics only works very well for visual artists, and I can easily share my work in a relaxed sort of way. There's also tons of other artists on instagram and the way it's set up I can easily see their pieces of artwork much more easily than twitter/facebook.
Also Facebook is a dead zone now. It's literally pointless political junk and rehashed memes shared by "friends". The only usage I have for it is to message my old friends.
Snapchat is also starting to die out ever since Instagram implemented their own "snapchat" feature. IMO Instagram just does it better than snapchat. Snapchat is just too bloated for me. See with instagram I can follow someone like Kanye West, see his life in cool pics and his "snaps" in a convenient way.
Yep. Kudos to them, I remember thinking this was one of the dumbest acquisitions I had heard of, until Whatsapp. But Instagram has been a huge success.
The thing is that the Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions are responsible for fueling this idea that all you need to do is create growth, and Facebook and/or Google will pay billions to acquire your company. Snapchat would never have gotten funding if there wasn't this dream that this could happen. We'll see if Snapchat is worth the $25B that is purported for their IPO, but I think those two acquisitions were the catalyst for all of this.
I never mocked this deal. I always thought this was a small price to pay for insurance that Instagram wouldn't subsume Facebook. It was only 1% of Facebook.
But I still think $19 billion was about $17 billion too much for WhatsApp. It's a messaging product that doesn't directly threaten Facebook the way Instagram does. They could have created 10x $1 billion teams to compete and easily done better than what they have with WhatsApp. It seems like a cowardly use of $19 billion. Oculus cost them $2 billion and there are many other breakthroughs that are equally underpriced.
I think the brilliance of Instagram is how they solved the problem of image ratio and rendering to different devices -- make everything a square. About the time of the purchase Facebook engineers and designers had been making talks about image layout. (I'll edit this if I find the bookmark to the link.) I wonder if the purchase was an extension of finding a working solution to working with images of different sizes, orientations, and aspect ratios.
I remember thinking this was a silly move, but my greatest regret is that I did not reserve my preferred user name in time. This means I'll never really be able to use the service.
Instagram is what will take down Snapchat or at least defend Facebook against Snapchat's offensive. Snapchat refuses, for good reason to its product, to enact discoverability which Instagram (thanks to Facebook's expertise) handles perfectly.
Instagram has also added to Facebook's main product through the autoplay videos, a tech that FB engineers could not get to work until the Instagram acquisition.
Let's be honest here. FB bought IG because they were the competition and what was the end result? Those guys at IG got benched for years and haven't done much since. So they won, if money was the goal. But if the goal was winning hearts and minds, and making an impact on the industry, they got sidelined. They lost. IG will never reach it's full potential. So yes, a good purchase on FB's part. But for IG? Debatable.
while not their main demographic I'm sure my wife and a lot of her friends only post to instragram now because she realized all she cared about on facebook were the pictures and the amount of ads in her feed were getting to her.
Her entire network solely posts on instragram and lets it link to facebook. She finds it a lot more uplifting than the endless political stuff shown to her on facebook.
How has Instagram not won hearts and minds? It's an absolutely massive social platform used by a ton of teenagers / young folks. Tons of people use it as their primary form of social media consumption.
I'm so confused how you came even remotely close to your completely wrong conclusion. IG has won in almost every way imaginable. Now that Snapchat is the new threat, IG has been aggressively copying their features and it's working.
[+] [-] mullingitover|9 years ago|reply
I can see a future, not even very far away, where facebook is essentially the AOL of our generation and having an account there is a punchline.
[+] [-] jackfrodo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3ta|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freyir|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nailer|9 years ago|reply
Edit: HN is eating emojis
[+] [-] peteretep|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgetsusername|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stevenj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheldoan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iloveluce|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcurve|9 years ago|reply
I bet most people don't even know Instagram is owned by facebook.
[+] [-] rudolf0|9 years ago|reply
Snapchat I actually get, since it's presenting a new kind of communication model. Facebook I get. But Instagram is just like any old image gallery, with a very rudimentary comment system and almost no features unrelated to image uploading.
[+] [-] bps4484|9 years ago|reply
You only upload 1 photo.
True, someone can dump a lot of photos one at a time, but I think that's a bit of an instagram faux pas. It tends to be that if someone is on vacation (for instance) they don't dump all their photos on instagram, they choose their one best photo, crop it, add a filter to it, and try to make it great. You don't create an album like you do on facebook. This makes the quality of what you see in your feed a lot higher than what you would see on facebook. I've been told by a few heavy users of instagram that this is what they love about it.
[+] [-] aroman|9 years ago|reply
At the time, about the only thing you could do with pictures you took with your phone was sync.
Instagram was released at a critical moment in history when phone cameras were starting to get good and cellular Internet was starting to get fast enough to reliably upload them.
You can't look at the landscape today and ask "Why is instagram popular?". You have to look at it in its historical context.
Source: radio interview with the founders
[+] [-] confounded|9 years ago|reply
I agree with the other posters on Instagram's features leading to a lower volume of higher quality content.
The UI makes the app very much about sharing photos you've taken, making content about things you have done not things you have seen on the web. And the app lets you know that those things should be beautiful. By default profiles are public, making content production more selective, and content discovery less based on personal connections.
What's most interesting to me is how the product shaped the cultural norms on the service.
If Facebook is the lowest-friction/highest-distribution place to share what's going on inside your head, IG is the place for leisure choices as identity. There's not a range of reactions, because everything on the service should be an expression of individual pleasure.
Many posts and feeds seem to focus on conspicuous, aspirational consumption (apparel, beauty products, cocktails, destinations, art galleries, etc.). It was a very smart choice for an ad-network.
[+] [-] pjc50|9 years ago|reply
Instagram became popular with the right celebrities at the right time - someone internal to the company no doubt has the user acquisition timeline and has worked out who the "patient zero" was. This sparked a wave of people joining to follow them and has effectively supplanted OK! magazine and similar. Just have a look at the most popular accounts:
http://www.dailydot.com/debug/most-followed-instagram-accoun...
There's essentially two big themes represented there, female celebrities and footballers.
[+] [-] kowdermeister|9 years ago|reply
The sharing and social factor was built in. Take a photo and sharing was automatic, which is pretty neat.
The name was also a huge factor. Photo Filter App 2.0 wouldn't have cut it.
[+] [-] ufmace|9 years ago|reply
It's probably also a case-study in how to market social networks. Get the right people on at the right time, so people want to get on and follow them, and then post their own content.
[+] [-] biztos|9 years ago|reply
So we use IG as our primary way to say hello, send an update, and register a Like. And then we go on FB when we have more time, or want to share a link, or whatever. But this is less and less common, judging by the relative activity I see on IG vs FB for my own connections. (And even a lot of the regular FB users are cross-posting all their photos now.)
As such it's not that great a photo-sharing UI, but it works and it doesn't require Yet Another Social Graph.
I don't know how much this is a factor in IG's continued growth in the face of Snapchat -- after all I'm talking about a cohort 30 and older. But my gut tells me it's significant.
[+] [-] GavinMcG|9 years ago|reply
Making it easy to positively reinforce your friends' content creation.
Fine-grained filtering of content that's relevant to you.
[+] [-] eknight15|9 years ago|reply
Luckily none of the photos were too embarrassing.
[+] [-] flamesnare3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lilbobbytables|9 years ago|reply
You can't enlarge an image you're viewing. Designed for mobile first, yet the size you view an image at is tied to whatever size your phone screen is. Why? I'm sure the image they are sending over the wire isn't at all as small as your screen, so why restrict it like that?
[+] [-] sho_hn|9 years ago|reply
I'd like to think the quality of their app has something to do with it. Unlike almost every mobile app I use, it's a joy to use (Android version). It's always snappy (this is huge), things always flow well, there is a ton of little detail functionality in there but it never overwhelms.
It's also great to see people's posts for a location you've tagged in your shot and compare their experience to yours. Or just find them. I know no other social network that does this so well.
It's the only social network I've stuck with and gotten any joy out of.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] notyourwork|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsunamifury|9 years ago|reply
The logic in both the article and most of the comments seems to utterly forget the context of which FB was in at the time.
[+] [-] exodust|9 years ago|reply
I started receiving notification emails from Instagram a few weeks ago, which I ignored at first thinking they were fake. On closer inspection they actually were from Instagram, so I clicked "forgot password" on the Instagram website, reset their password, logged in and deleted all their content and permanently deleted their account. By the looks of it, the profile belonged to some kid - a few family photos and so on.
It's quite slack of Instagram that this is possible. They should not be allowing people to create profiles and use the service before first verifying the email address used to sign up with. I guess basic verification is trumped by the need for "active users" to motivate these "stroke of genius" articles.
[+] [-] symlinkk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jplahn|9 years ago|reply
I wasn't much of an Instagram user for a long time until I started getting into photography. I'm still a total photography noob, but now my feed of pictures is a combination of friends and amazing photographers that serve as inspiration. I deleted my Facebook account a couple months ago and haven't looked back. Whereas I spent time on Facebook scrolling through vitriol, my time on Instragram is a constant stream of friends lives and beautiful pictures.
I've realized a shallow social network is all the social network I need.
[+] [-] vit05|9 years ago|reply
They only need to make a better discovery option than the "Follow someone".
[+] [-] bhandziuk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ericson2314|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasbesoin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terda12|9 years ago|reply
Also Facebook is a dead zone now. It's literally pointless political junk and rehashed memes shared by "friends". The only usage I have for it is to message my old friends.
Snapchat is also starting to die out ever since Instagram implemented their own "snapchat" feature. IMO Instagram just does it better than snapchat. Snapchat is just too bloated for me. See with instagram I can follow someone like Kanye West, see his life in cool pics and his "snaps" in a convenient way.
[+] [-] pfarnsworth|9 years ago|reply
The thing is that the Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions are responsible for fueling this idea that all you need to do is create growth, and Facebook and/or Google will pay billions to acquire your company. Snapchat would never have gotten funding if there wasn't this dream that this could happen. We'll see if Snapchat is worth the $25B that is purported for their IPO, but I think those two acquisitions were the catalyst for all of this.
[+] [-] notfreeyet|9 years ago|reply
But I still think $19 billion was about $17 billion too much for WhatsApp. It's a messaging product that doesn't directly threaten Facebook the way Instagram does. They could have created 10x $1 billion teams to compete and easily done better than what they have with WhatsApp. It seems like a cowardly use of $19 billion. Oculus cost them $2 billion and there are many other breakthroughs that are equally underpriced.
[+] [-] zappo2938|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakebasile|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aznpwnzor|9 years ago|reply
Instagram has also added to Facebook's main product through the autoplay videos, a tech that FB engineers could not get to work until the Instagram acquisition.
[+] [-] ianstallings|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlmcqueen|9 years ago|reply
Her entire network solely posts on instragram and lets it link to facebook. She finds it a lot more uplifting than the endless political stuff shown to her on facebook.
[+] [-] bpicolo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vecter|9 years ago|reply