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Here's what I don't understand, and I'd love to hear why I am wrong about this because I am sure I am wrong, I just haven't grok'ed /why/. A lot of people seem
by eblume 15y ago
Here's what I don't understand, and I'd love to hear why I am wrong about this because I am sure I am wrong, I just haven't grok'ed /why/.
A lot of people seem to be arguing that this move may have been not to get Instagram tighter with Facebook, but rather to prevent any other platform or company from acquiring Instagram. Ergo, it's a move by Facebook to further cement their lead as 'the place you share stuff'.
Ok, if that's true, in what way does buying Instagram 'further cement their lead'? Isn't Instagram really, extremely easy to code on your own? I'm in the process of learning Rails and I feel confident I could bang out a Heroku app using S3 for storage to upload/display/process photos. Then all you need is a thin native device to grab photos from the library or from the camera directly and upload it to that app. You don't need to have any platform-specific code outside of handling the camera and photo roll on the device.
Point is - did this do anything to stop, say, Google Plus from making their own Instagram?
Another related argument is that this means that the existing user-base of Instagram will get folded in to Facebook. Personally, I would be flabbergasted to find that more than 0.1% of Instagram users don't already have Facebook accounts. And if you are not using Facebook for photos already, you're either not going to want to share them at all, or else you've already got someplace else you want to share those photos.
Basically - where is the value in this acquisition? I mean any value at all? It seems like they paid 1B to avoid having to develop a very very small app.
- jmitcheson 15y agoI've been thinking of ways to phrase this without sounding rude, but it's difficult to avoid sounding that way in the context of how you asked your question :) So please don't think I'm intentionally being rude... Your confusion stems from the fact that you are looking at the situation though a developers eyes. The acquisition of Instagram has nothing at all to do with the code. Nothing. It's about Instagram's users, their brand, and their founders / team. Instagram has ~27 million users [1], a good brand and smart founders. Their engineers probably know a thing or two about scale too, which I'm sure facebook would find useful. [1] http://www.quora.com/Instagram/How-many-users-does-Instagram-have http://www.quora.com/Instagram/How-many-users-does-Instagram... PS. IMO, most startup logic makes a lot more sense when you stop looking through developer-centric goggles. You're not making code you want to turn into a company, you're starting a company that you want to produce code...
- tripzilch 15y agoIMO that wasn't rude at all? :) Anyway, I'd even argue it's mostly just the 27M users and the brand. While smart founders and engineers knowing a thing or two about scale are much less common than <code for a photo sharing app>, it's the users and the brand that made it worth $1B to Facebook.
- Egregore 15y agoIf they paid 1B for 27M users it means they paid about $37 per user...
- eblume 15y agoThanks, and that wasn't rude at all. But again - those 27 million users are almost certainly already on Facebook. If Facebook came out with 'Hipster Pics for Facebook!' (obviously I should not be in charge of naming things) then I would assume the vast majority of those users would begin using 'Hipster Pics for Facebook!' instead of Instagram. I guess it would make some sense for G+ to buy it in the hopes of driving use of G+ with it...
- bad_user 15y agoThe web is littered with photo sharing apps, yet most of them aren't even a dot compared to Flickr, a web service which is supposed to be dying because of Facebook. Yes you can create your own, but that's not the hard part. The hard part is having users. Google Plus is a bad example because of that. The acquisition also makes no sense to me btw.