Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was a good move

Re:Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was ... by aroman on Friday December 30, 2016 @02:13PM (#13286519)

Instagram was the first app of its kind to make phone cameras social.

At the time, about the only thing you could do with pictures you took with your phone was sync.

Instagram was released at a critical moment in history when phone cameras were starting to get good and cellular Internet was starting to get fast enough to reliably upload them.

You can't look at the landscape today and ask "Why is instagram popular?". You have to look at it in its historical context.

Source: radio interview with the founders

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Re:Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was ... by ec109685 on Friday December 30, 2016 @03:37PM (#13287219)

Facebook had image uploading via mobile at the same time instagram was purchased. So it isn't just that.

Instagram smartest thing they did was leverage the Facebook social graph (something much harder to do now) to integrate instagram photos as posts in the feed, so that when a user clicked on them, you ended up at instagram rather than staying inside Facebook.

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Re:Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was ... by basch on Friday December 30, 2016 @06:41PM (#13288479)

Instagram was a camera + profile app. Snapchat was a camera+message.

Facebook took a long time to get mobile right. Instagrams simplicity, and Facebooks lack of response was what allowed Instagram to grow. And dont forget Instagram was originally more a photo hosting adoon for twitter, similar to imgur to reddit.

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Re:Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was ... by oblio on Friday December 30, 2016 @04:30PM (#13287636)

> leverage the Facebook social graph (something much harder to do now)

Could you give a bit more details about this?

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Re:Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was ... by ec109685 on Saturday December 31, 2016 @02:42PM (#13292752)

Here's a good article on the subject: https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/my-pr...

One more: https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/18/facebook-data-voxer/

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Re:Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was ... by hexedpackets on Friday December 30, 2016 @02:37PM (#13286735)

For anyone interested in listening to the interview, I believe aroman is referring to "How I Built This" from NPR: https://www.npr.org/player/embed/493923357/494083296

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Re:Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was ... by sbov on Friday December 30, 2016 @03:05PM (#13286972)

As an aside, our most successful projects were similar to this. Right place, right time, and people on HN would probably assume the MVP could be built in a week, which was true at least in our cases.

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Re:Once mocked, Facebook’s $1B acquisition of Instagram was ... by codecamper on Friday December 30, 2016 @07:11PM (#13288604)

Yup. They were first and they iterated & made it great. Didn't even have to write an Android version for a while.

When you compare the amount of work required to get a startup off the ground then to what is required now. (dual mobile platforms & web & social) And the total number of apps & services. It's a deluge of information.

Then is there much change to start a service or company these days & see success? Maybe I'm getting too old, but normally I'd be full of ideas. These days I can't think of any.

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