By now, you’ve probably all heard about Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of the popular photo sharing app Instagram. The mobile app, at only 18 months old, has over 30 million registered users and has, since the Facebook purchase, been ranked the Top Free App in the iTunes App Store. The app also garnered 5 million downloads on Android devices when it debuted less than one month ago. Recently, investors valued the company’s worth at $500 million… so, the question going through everyone’s mind naturally was what made Zuckerberg so inclined to throw in an extra $500 million?
Source: WSJ
Last semester in my New Media Technologies class, my professor predicted that Facebook’s newest venture would be to take over the photo sharing market. He showed us a prototype of the then-only-speculated Timeline and cover photos, and some snapshots of what photo viewing would look like with full screen options. One can only assume, therefore, that Zuckerberg’s acquisition of the company was done in hopes of creating a monopoly on the mobile-app/photo-upload market. Facebook wants Facebook to be the first app you click on when you pull out that infinitely-valuable smartphone in your pocket. Instagram was impeding on that space and thus was going to become a very dangerous competition to the social network. From a Mashable article:
The photo-sharing app is essentially everything Facebook wants to be on your mobile phone. Facebook wants people using its mobile app to share photos of what they’re doing with friends and to share their location -– something Instagram users have no problem doing.
With Facebook’s pending IPO, there was too much risk in not purchasing an app that was not only formed under the premise of creating content, but then sharing it. An article written on Mashable earlier this week noted that content creation has been on the horizon for some time now (case in point: Pinterest), and prior to the Instagram acquisition, Facebook had been pretty much all about sharing content, not creating it (unless you count status updates).
There’s been a lot of speculation that Facebook will end up ruining the Instagram experience for users who have grown so attached to the app’s independent, hipster-esque feel: Twitter overflowed with the complaints of users crying that they’d be deleting the app. But several sources claim that this could be the best thing for Instagram and and its 13 employees (who are now worth $77 million each). Look what Google did for YouTube back in 2006, right before the convergence of TV and internet. Facebook has acquired not only the mobile platform, but a team of brilliant individuals capable of building this kind of app. I think it will be interesting to see what this merger means for both companies, and how it will change the user experience.
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