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They are just going from FB to Instagram: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/teens-abandoning-facebook-still-flocking-to-instagram.html?recirc=taboolainternal htt

They are just going from FB to Instagram: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/teens-abandoning-facebook-still-flocking-to-instagram.html?recirc=taboolainternal https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/teens-abandoning-facebook-st... FB can shift its model to becoming like priceline. Just try to buy up all the social networks. For example most travel site you probably use are owned by priceline. The same way Facebook could maybe buy up other social networks.

adtac 8y ago
Wouldn't that be a case of abusing their market position to anti-competitively protect their market share? The same thing Microsoft was sued for?
- roywiggins 8y ago
  It's completely legal to be a monopoly by buying every competitor out fair and square.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    I think this shouldn't be legal.
  - eiaoa 8y ago
    > It's completely legal to be a monopoly by buying every competitor out fair and square. Pretty sure it's not in the US, or at least can be halted by the disapproval of antitrust regulators. For example: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/staples-office-depot-merger-killed-by-antitrust-claims-again-2016-05-10 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/staples-office-depot-merge...
    - smhenderson 8y ago
      at least can be halted by the disapproval of antitrust regulators. That's the key though, they can continue to try until someone sits up and takes notice. Depending on the regulatory climate at any given time a company will have varying degrees of success with this before they are stopped outright before buying any more competition. Either that or they suddenly start abusing their positions such that people/other companies complain enough for regulators to take notice of them.
  - rhcom2 8y ago
    "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890
  - nabla9 8y ago
    This is incorrect. Facebook already needs a permissions from multiple regulators if it attempts to buy competitor – not just from US regulators. WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions needed approvals from EU before they could continue.
    - mehblahwhatevs 8y ago
      > WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions needed approvals from EU before they could continue. What would it mean for a US based company if they decided to acquire two other US based companies and US regulators approved it, but EU regulators didn't? What would happen if the company went forward with the acquisition anyway?
      - vertex-four 8y ago
        Most likely, the company would be fined and ordered to either sell off the company or agree to some other set of penalties. If they refused to pay the fine or perform their penalties, they could be banned from operating in the EU. They'd be unable to advertise in the EU, make deals with EU companies, employ people and set up datacentres in the EU, etc etc. Companies like Facebook aren't "US based" in any way that means anything except for where their CEO normally works and which stock exchange their shares are traded on - they have operations that are central to their business all over the world, and many of those can be disrupted.
      - nabla9 8y ago
        They will have to satisfy regulators from all major regions where they want to operate. Non-compliance results financial, or criminal penalties or not being allowed to operate in EU. In theory FB could just agree with EU that they will cease all operations in EU and leave in peace, but that would effectively kill FB over long term. Competitors would crush them. Imagine a mobile carrier who can't make calls to EU or email provider who can't sent or receive calls from EU. FB is in the same situation. It's a social network. Value for the users comes from connections. Every international company negotiates some kind of deal if they want to stay international.
cft 8y ago
But they are running out of potential sites to buy. I wonder if they have offered to buy Reddit?
- moate 8y ago
  Of course they have. Why wouldn't they? They probably just didn't offer enough billions.
weberc2 8y ago
I bet the Facebook employees who pushed to buy Instagram are feeling pretty justified right about now. But still, I'm not sure if Instagram can be monetized to the same degree as Facebook was in the last decade, especially as they continue to wreck their brand with privacy abuses (note that I'm not a privacy hawk).
- fermienrico 8y ago
  Instagram is better positioned for monetization because of: A) Stories and TV like content to compete with Snap B) Ads integrated into their proprietary browser (aka Instagram app) C) Sponsored live events They’ve essentially made a closed ecosystem without having to rely on a desktop browser and they’re more mobile centric than Facebook. Furthermore, Visual content is the basis for IG and it lends itself better for monetization.
  - te_chris 8y ago
    From a biz perspective, yes, but it's different. If anything, IG works better for facebook and its users because it's more honest. It's a platform for photo and video sharing and loads of people just use it to voluntarily follow brands anyway. In some ways, instagram is facebook's distilled product - rather than a directory which became everything, it's just a feed of content, so the terms and user expectations are different.
- cronix 8y ago
  You mean to ruin a secondary platform? I've all but stopped using Instagram for the same reason I've all but stopped using FB... there are just too many ads to scroll past to see what I'm actually there to see (the people I'm friends with/following). Every other post now seems to be an ad/sponsored post. Both platforms have gone overboard to the point that I only visit maybe once/week now instead of daily. I also don't have any FB related apps on my phone since they all share data with FB and want access to every possible damn permission. I just visit the sites in my desktop browser now (and sign out when done). So, they better be charging a LOT more for the ads they show as I don't think I'm in the minority here by visiting a lot less often due to the complete over-saturation of them.
user5994461 8y ago
>>> For example most travel site you probably use are owned by priceline. Actually, most travel sites you use are probably owned by Expedia, then priceline. Together, they own every single major web sites about travel.
- Scarblac 8y ago
  Priceline actually got renamed to Booking Holding earlier this year, to reflect the fact that Booking.com is by far the largest part of their turnover.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    Expedia have hotels.com, the main competitor to booking. The plane business and the hotel business are of similar size from what I've seen. Both huge and shadowing everything else.
- smeyer 8y ago
  I just got back from a three week vacation, and the travel-specific site I used most was TripAdvisor. I also used a lot of sites not specific to travel (like google maps and reddit). Does TripAdivsor not qualify as a "major website about travel"? I don't actually know what share of travel-related web traffic they get, and I realize that Expedia and Priceline both own lots of other sites in the space.
  - theelfismike 8y ago
    TripAdvisor was owned by Expedia from 2004-2011
    - user5994461 8y ago
      It's still part of the Expedia portfolio. There are a few brands whose stocks are listed separately.
      - 8y ago
lostgame 8y ago
Does anyone else find it super-strange that, as what is consistently one of the top ten iOS applications in the App Store, and a massive company now purchased by an even more massive company, Instagram can not be bothered to produce a native iPad app? It's been 8 years (the first iPad was released in 2010) and the platform has certainly proven itself not to be a fad. Instagram looks like an actual joke on my iPad Pro 12".
- djstein 8y ago
  I believe they have focused on their web app for this. Turning it into a home screen based web application has been far better. Not as great as a native app, but better than the iPhone one scaled up!
  - lostgame 8y ago
    Okay, so put a WebKit wrapper around that?
    - sterlind 8y ago
      Is there some one-click way to "bottle" web apps like this on demand? I'm thinking of something that does some light crawling, fills its cache up, shims xmlhttprequests for static data, and sandwiches it in a shell. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could always fall back on the real site when its cache falls through..
      - lostgame 8y ago
        Yup. Cordova / PhoneGap pretty much more-or-less does the trick for this.
      - hunter2_ 8y ago
        You don't even need a native bottle. The site just needs to offer a PWA manifest and associated service worker functionality. https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/ https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/
batrat 8y ago
I hate Instagram more than FB. Everybody become some sort of "influencer" there, everybody is selling something!!!??!! On top of that 1 out of 3 posts is an AD. I don't have it on my phone anymore.
- lambda_lover 8y ago
  There are far, far, too many ads. But the ads are at least more tasteful than on most platforms. If you keep your list of follows < 100 or so (and take care to cull any accounts that get too spammy -- limiting yourself to people you know personally is a good strategy for this), Instagram is a pretty pleasant platform to check once a day, especially if your friends use Stories. That being said, it suffers from Facebook syndrome to the extent that you literally have to fight the platform to make it usable. I'm holding out for some kind of federated hybrid of instagram/facebook in the near future with a chronological timeline and a reasonable volume of ads (to keep the lights on)/subscription option.
  - rad_gruchalski 8y ago
    > There are far, far, too many ads. But the ads are at least more tasteful than on most platforms. It’s all shit but this shit is shinier!
nothis 8y ago
>They are just going from FB to Instagram It's easy to get cynical about this but what I like about Instagram as opposed to facebook is that it's superficial by design. That makes it way less of a "thing". It doesn't pretend like it truly "manages your social life" like facebook does, it's just funny pictures your extroverted friend posts. Instagram stories are gone after 24 hours. They're temporal. I know people who post 10 or 20 things a day on stories and maybe a pic here and there every couple of weeks otherwise. Similarly, WhatsApp is SMS. SMS running through facebook but it's not very organized, either. My friend deleted WhatsApp, now we text via SMS and I see no difference. A group I was part of decided to use Telegram, so I just made a Telegram account, no friction whatsoever, there's no reason to feel like you're leaving something behind. People in Europe use it because mobile internet is way cheaper than paying for SMS since a text message via mobile internet is like a couple of bytes of traffic. Same with images. Group chat is nice. But it's all not very... connected. It doesn't really make a profile, old messages are basically just an archive that nobody bothers to look through. I'm aware that facebook probably runs every machine learning algorithm ever invented through that data but from a user's perspective, it's way less of a "world", it's just one tool to share messages/pictures. It's not your life. Social networks aren't "just facebook" anymore and they're way less centralized that way.
- aylmao 8y ago
  Honestly I'd imagine this is on purpose. Facebook wouldn't want their platforms to overlap too much anyway-- wouldn't that be putting all eggs in one basket, in terms of vision for the future of social interaction? There's bets they're clearly taking across companies (like stories), and they definitely are trying to flow traffic between Instagram and Facebook, but to some degree they've kept each app their own and that has only worked in their favour so far.
erikb 8y ago
Not just them. Almost everybody does that. Just a few weeks ago saw a documentary that explained that the same happens in dating apps/websites, for instance. It's also logical. I mean, what can you do when you are the market leader already.
- da02 8y ago
  What was the name of the documentary?

adtac 8y ago

Wouldn't that be a case of abusing their market position to anti-competitively protect their market share? The same thing Microsoft was sued for?

roywiggins 8y ago
It's completely legal to be a monopoly by buying every competitor out fair and square.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  I think this shouldn't be legal.
- eiaoa 8y ago
  > It's completely legal to be a monopoly by buying every competitor out fair and square. Pretty sure it's not in the US, or at least can be halted by the disapproval of antitrust regulators. For example: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/staples-office-depot-merger-killed-by-antitrust-claims-again-2016-05-10 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/staples-office-depot-merge...
  - smhenderson 8y ago
    at least can be halted by the disapproval of antitrust regulators. That's the key though, they can continue to try until someone sits up and takes notice. Depending on the regulatory climate at any given time a company will have varying degrees of success with this before they are stopped outright before buying any more competition. Either that or they suddenly start abusing their positions such that people/other companies complain enough for regulators to take notice of them.
- rhcom2 8y ago
  "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890
- nabla9 8y ago
  This is incorrect. Facebook already needs a permissions from multiple regulators if it attempts to buy competitor – not just from US regulators. WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions needed approvals from EU before they could continue.
  - mehblahwhatevs 8y ago
    > WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions needed approvals from EU before they could continue. What would it mean for a US based company if they decided to acquire two other US based companies and US regulators approved it, but EU regulators didn't? What would happen if the company went forward with the acquisition anyway?
    - vertex-four 8y ago
      Most likely, the company would be fined and ordered to either sell off the company or agree to some other set of penalties. If they refused to pay the fine or perform their penalties, they could be banned from operating in the EU. They'd be unable to advertise in the EU, make deals with EU companies, employ people and set up datacentres in the EU, etc etc. Companies like Facebook aren't "US based" in any way that means anything except for where their CEO normally works and which stock exchange their shares are traded on - they have operations that are central to their business all over the world, and many of those can be disrupted.
    - nabla9 8y ago
      They will have to satisfy regulators from all major regions where they want to operate. Non-compliance results financial, or criminal penalties or not being allowed to operate in EU. In theory FB could just agree with EU that they will cease all operations in EU and leave in peace, but that would effectively kill FB over long term. Competitors would crush them. Imagine a mobile carrier who can't make calls to EU or email provider who can't sent or receive calls from EU. FB is in the same situation. It's a social network. Value for the users comes from connections. Every international company negotiates some kind of deal if they want to stay international.

cft 8y ago

But they are running out of potential sites to buy. I wonder if they have offered to buy Reddit?

moate 8y ago
Of course they have. Why wouldn't they? They probably just didn't offer enough billions.

weberc2 8y ago

I bet the Facebook employees who pushed to buy Instagram are feeling pretty justified right about now. But still, I'm not sure if Instagram can be monetized to the same degree as Facebook was in the last decade, especially as they continue to wreck their brand with privacy abuses (note that I'm not a privacy hawk).

fermienrico 8y ago
Instagram is better positioned for monetization because of: A) Stories and TV like content to compete with Snap B) Ads integrated into their proprietary browser (aka Instagram app) C) Sponsored live events They’ve essentially made a closed ecosystem without having to rely on a desktop browser and they’re more mobile centric than Facebook. Furthermore, Visual content is the basis for IG and it lends itself better for monetization.
- te_chris 8y ago
  From a biz perspective, yes, but it's different. If anything, IG works better for facebook and its users because it's more honest. It's a platform for photo and video sharing and loads of people just use it to voluntarily follow brands anyway. In some ways, instagram is facebook's distilled product - rather than a directory which became everything, it's just a feed of content, so the terms and user expectations are different.
cronix 8y ago
You mean to ruin a secondary platform? I've all but stopped using Instagram for the same reason I've all but stopped using FB... there are just too many ads to scroll past to see what I'm actually there to see (the people I'm friends with/following). Every other post now seems to be an ad/sponsored post. Both platforms have gone overboard to the point that I only visit maybe once/week now instead of daily. I also don't have any FB related apps on my phone since they all share data with FB and want access to every possible damn permission. I just visit the sites in my desktop browser now (and sign out when done). So, they better be charging a LOT more for the ads they show as I don't think I'm in the minority here by visiting a lot less often due to the complete over-saturation of them.

user5994461 8y ago

>>> For example most travel site you probably use are owned by priceline. Actually, most travel sites you use are probably owned by Expedia, then priceline. Together, they own every single major web sites about travel.

Scarblac 8y ago
Priceline actually got renamed to Booking Holding earlier this year, to reflect the fact that Booking.com is by far the largest part of their turnover.
- user5994461 8y ago
  Expedia have hotels.com, the main competitor to booking. The plane business and the hotel business are of similar size from what I've seen. Both huge and shadowing everything else.
smeyer 8y ago
I just got back from a three week vacation, and the travel-specific site I used most was TripAdvisor. I also used a lot of sites not specific to travel (like google maps and reddit). Does TripAdivsor not qualify as a "major website about travel"? I don't actually know what share of travel-related web traffic they get, and I realize that Expedia and Priceline both own lots of other sites in the space.
- theelfismike 8y ago
  TripAdvisor was owned by Expedia from 2004-2011
  - user5994461 8y ago
    It's still part of the Expedia portfolio. There are a few brands whose stocks are listed separately.
    - 8y ago

lostgame 8y ago

Does anyone else find it super-strange that, as what is consistently one of the top ten iOS applications in the App Store, and a massive company now purchased by an even more massive company, Instagram can not be bothered to produce a native iPad app? It's been 8 years (the first iPad was released in 2010) and the platform has certainly proven itself not to be a fad. Instagram looks like an actual joke on my iPad Pro 12".

djstein 8y ago
I believe they have focused on their web app for this. Turning it into a home screen based web application has been far better. Not as great as a native app, but better than the iPhone one scaled up!
- lostgame 8y ago
  Okay, so put a WebKit wrapper around that?
  - sterlind 8y ago
    Is there some one-click way to "bottle" web apps like this on demand? I'm thinking of something that does some light crawling, fills its cache up, shims xmlhttprequests for static data, and sandwiches it in a shell. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could always fall back on the real site when its cache falls through..
    - lostgame 8y ago
      Yup. Cordova / PhoneGap pretty much more-or-less does the trick for this.
    - hunter2_ 8y ago
      You don't even need a native bottle. The site just needs to offer a PWA manifest and associated service worker functionality. https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/ https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/

batrat 8y ago

I hate Instagram more than FB. Everybody become some sort of "influencer" there, everybody is selling something!!!??!! On top of that 1 out of 3 posts is an AD. I don't have it on my phone anymore.

lambda_lover 8y ago
There are far, far, too many ads. But the ads are at least more tasteful than on most platforms. If you keep your list of follows < 100 or so (and take care to cull any accounts that get too spammy -- limiting yourself to people you know personally is a good strategy for this), Instagram is a pretty pleasant platform to check once a day, especially if your friends use Stories. That being said, it suffers from Facebook syndrome to the extent that you literally have to fight the platform to make it usable. I'm holding out for some kind of federated hybrid of instagram/facebook in the near future with a chronological timeline and a reasonable volume of ads (to keep the lights on)/subscription option.
- rad_gruchalski 8y ago
  > There are far, far, too many ads. But the ads are at least more tasteful than on most platforms. It’s all shit but this shit is shinier!

nothis 8y ago

>They are just going from FB to Instagram It's easy to get cynical about this but what I like about Instagram as opposed to facebook is that it's superficial by design. That makes it way less of a "thing". It doesn't pretend like it truly "manages your social life" like facebook does, it's just funny pictures your extroverted friend posts. Instagram stories are gone after 24 hours. They're temporal. I know people who post 10 or 20 things a day on stories and maybe a pic here and there every couple of weeks otherwise. Similarly, WhatsApp is SMS. SMS running through facebook but it's not very organized, either. My friend deleted WhatsApp, now we text via SMS and I see no difference. A group I was part of decided to use Telegram, so I just made a Telegram account, no friction whatsoever, there's no reason to feel like you're leaving something behind. People in Europe use it because mobile internet is way cheaper than paying for SMS since a text message via mobile internet is like a couple of bytes of traffic. Same with images. Group chat is nice. But it's all not very... connected. It doesn't really make a profile, old messages are basically just an archive that nobody bothers to look through. I'm aware that facebook probably runs every machine learning algorithm ever invented through that data but from a user's perspective, it's way less of a "world", it's just one tool to share messages/pictures. It's not your life. Social networks aren't "just facebook" anymore and they're way less centralized that way.

aylmao 8y ago
Honestly I'd imagine this is on purpose. Facebook wouldn't want their platforms to overlap too much anyway-- wouldn't that be putting all eggs in one basket, in terms of vision for the future of social interaction? There's bets they're clearly taking across companies (like stories), and they definitely are trying to flow traffic between Instagram and Facebook, but to some degree they've kept each app their own and that has only worked in their favour so far.

erikb 8y ago

Not just them. Almost everybody does that. Just a few weeks ago saw a documentary that explained that the same happens in dating apps/websites, for instance. It's also logical. I mean, what can you do when you are the market leader already.

da02 8y ago
What was the name of the documentary?