So yeah, everyone's already talking about it but I have to weigh in too: Facebook bought Instagram yesterday. One billion dollars, cash and stock, for an app that as far as I can tell has like thirteen employees. Thirteen. I had to read that twice.
I'm not even mad, exactly. I'm just sitting here trying to do the math in my head and it doesn't add up to anything that makes sense unless you stop thinking about it as buying a company and start thinking about it as buying a number - 30 million users, most of them the exact demographic Facebook is terrified of losing to something shinier and more mobile-first. Zuckerberg posted about it himself, which is a little funny, a guy who built the biggest social network on earth announcing on his own wall that he's buying the app people use when they don't want to post on Facebook.
And the timing! Instagram literally just shipped an Android version last week. I want to say it was Tuesday, the 3rd, and I remember because a friend of mine who's been holding out on an iPhone for two years purely so he could use Instagram texted me at like 11pm going "IT'S HERE" like Christmas had come early. A million downloads in the first day on Android alone. Then six days later, still riding that wave, boom, Facebook check clears (well, will clear, I assume there's paperwork). That's not a coincidence, that's a company striking while a number is trending up and not waiting to see if it plateaus.
What I keep coming back to is how weird it is that this whole company was built on a premise that's basically the opposite of Facebook's whole thing. Instagram is fast, it's a filter and a caption and gone, you're not building a timeline of your entire life, you're just tossing out a square photo of your lunch or your dog or, if you're my downstairs neighbor apparently, an extremely large number of sunsets taken from what has to be the same balcony. Facebook is the opposite of that. Facebook is the place where nothing ever really goes away and everything gets tagged and cross-referenced and shown to your aunt three years later. Bolting one onto the other seems like it should be awkward, like putting a motorcycle engine in a minivan.
Officially the line is that Instagram stays independent, its own app, its own brand, Kevin Systrom still running it. I'd bet real money that lasts about a year, maybe two if we're generous, before it starts sprouting Facebook-shaped features. Not because anyone's lying right now, just because that's what happens. Companies say "nothing changes" and then eighteen months later the acquired thing has ads and a News Feed equivalent and half its original personality got sanded off in a redesign meeting. I hope I'm wrong about this one specifically because I actually like Instagram, unlike, say, every third-party Twitter client that got slowly strangled over the past year.
Small tangent but it's been bugging me: a billion dollars is such an insane headline number that I think it's actually distorting how people are reacting to this, myself included. We're all doing the "can you believe it" thing about the price tag instead of talking about what it means that a photo filter app with barely a dozen people on payroll can move markets and dominate a news cycle like this. That says more about where attention lives right now than the dollar figure does. Anyway. I'm still on iPhone-only Instagram, still not on Android, still taking too many pictures of coffee. Some things a billion-dollar acquisition doesn't change.