So its been ten days since the Instagram thing broke and I still cant quite believe it. Facebook buying Instagram for a billion dollars. Not "a company that makes money" billion dollars, a thirteen-person-team-and-a-really-good-photo-filter billion dollars. I keep going back to Zuckerberg's little announcement post where he promises Instagram gets to "stay independent" and I dont buy it for a second, not because Im cynical about everything Facebook does (I mostly am, but thats besides the point) but because "independent" acquisitions almost never stay that way once the checks clear.
I've had Instagram on my phone since last summer, back when it was iPhone-only and you had to explain to people what it even was. My brother-in-law is an Android guy through and through and spent months telling me Hipstamatic was better, which, fine, maybe the filters were fancier, but Instagram had the feed and the follows and that was the whole point. Then two weeks ago they finally shipped the Android version and apparently picked up something like a million new users a day right out of the gate. Ten million in ten days is the number floating around. Thats an absurd growth curve for an app that, again, does not make any money. No ads, no premium tier, nothing. So I guess I get why Facebook wanted in before anyone else did, they clearly saw where the eyeballs were headed and didnt want to find out the hard way.
What bugs me isnt the price tag though, its what happens next. Instagram works because its dumb simple. You open it, you take a square photo, you slap a filter on it, you post it, done. The second Facebook starts "integrating" it (and they will, thats what a billion dollars buys you eventually even if the founders keep their own logo for a while) it turns into another feed inside a feed, tagged and cross-posted and monetized within an inch of its life. I give it eighteen months before Instagram photos start showing up as sponsored content in my Facebook timeline whether I asked for that or not.
Small tangent but related: on the actual day Im writing this, Spotify quietly rolled out its Android app too, which almost got buried under the Instagram noise and thats a shame because I think its a bigger deal for how people actually use their phones day to day. Ive been on Spotify since they let US users in and the desktop client is still kind of clunky honestly (why does it take four seconds to search a three-letter query sometimes) but having it live on the phone the same way it does on the laptop is the thing that actually changes habits. Nobody's going to remember the Android Spotify launch in a year. Everyone's going to remember the billion dollar photo app purchase. Thats just how news works, the big scary number wins the week even when the smaller thing is the one that matters more long term.
Anyway. I dont have an Android phone myself, still on my beat up iPhone 4 with a cracked corner I keep meaning to get fixed, so I cant even try the new Instagram app to see if Android users are getting a worse or better experience than us iOS folks did at launch last October. If anyone reading this has tried it, Im curious whether the interface feels bolted-on or whether they actually built it right the first time. My guess, going purely off how most companies handle a second-platform launch, is bolted-on with some rough edges that get smoothed out over the next few updates.
The part of this whole story I keep underrating is that Kevin Systrom is what, twenty-eight? Started the company as a location check-in app called Burbn before pivoting hard into just photos, which is its own good lesson about not being precious with your original idea. A year and a half from "lets pivot" to a billion dollar acquisition is the kind of timeline that makes every other startup founder either feel incredibly motivated or incredibly depressed about their own progress, probably somewhere in between depending on the day.
Facebook's also supposedly gearing up for its own IPO next month, valuing the company somewhere around a hundred billion, so this whole thing is happening right as they're trying to look their most impressive to Wall Street. Convenient timing if nothing else.