So this happened a couple days ago and I don't think it's gotten nearly the attention it deserves, probably because everyone's still glued to the Sony mess (more on that some other day, I don't even know where to start with that one). Instagram announced Wednesday that it's crossed 300 million monthly active users. For context, Twitter's last reported number, from their Q3 earnings call back in October, was 284 million. So a photo-sharing app that most of our parents still think is "the filter thing the kids use" is now bigger, by Twitter's own preferred metric, than Twitter.
I want to be careful here because "monthly active users" is a mushy number and companies pick the stat that makes them look best. Twitter still wins on total tweets, on being the place breaking news actually breaks, on the stuff journalists and nerds like me obsessively refresh. But raw headcount is raw headcount, and 300 million people opening an app at least once a month to look at pictures of brunch and mountains is not nothing.
I've been on Instagram since 2011, back when it was iPhone-only and you had to explain to people what it even was ("it's like a camera app but everyone can see your photos, no, not Facebook, a different thing"). My feed now is maybe 40% actual friends, 30% people I met once at a conference, and 30% accounts I followed because of one good photo three years ago and never unfollowed. I should clean that up. I say that every December and never do it, so let's not pretend this year is different.
What strikes me about the Instagram number isn't really Instagram, it's the shape of what's happening to the whole feed-based internet. Twitter is a river you dip into. Instagram, at least right now, is closer to a scrapbook: everything's in order, nothing gets buried by an algorithm deciding what you "probably" want to see first. I genuinely hope they never mess with that, because the second Instagram starts reordering my feed by some engagement score instead of just showing me the last however-many photos in order, that's the day it turns into everything else. (Watch, I'll be eating these words in a year. Wouldn't be the first time.)
There's also something a little funny about the timing. Facebook bought Instagram back in April 2012 for a billion dollars, and I remember the reaction at the time, half "smart move," half "a billion dollars for an app with no revenue?? for photos??" People forget how insane that number sounded then. Now Instagram alone probably has more active users than most countries have people, and it's not even close to done growing. Whatever Zuckerberg saw in 2012, he saw it early.
None of this really changes how I use either app day to day. I still open Twitter first thing in the morning with my coffee because that's where I find out if anything actually happened overnight — an earthquake, a product launch, a plane thing, whatever. Instagram's more of an evening app for me, something I scroll through on the couch after dinner when I don't want to think about anything. Different jobs, different apps. I don't think one number crossing another really settles which app "won," because I'm not sure they were ever playing the same game.
One small complaint while I'm here: Instagram's search is still bad. If I want to find a specific photo I posted eight months ago, my only real option is scrolling my own grid like an archaeologist, because there's no useful way to search your own captions or dates. Twitter's search has problems too but at least it exists in a form I can use. Somebody fix this, please, it's 2014.
Anyway. Interesting week for numbers, even if the number that everyone's actually talking about has nothing to do with Instagram or Twitter and everything to do with leaked emails I'm trying very hard not to have an opinion on in public.