You're mischaracterizing Instagram. It's not "a photo service," it's the photo service. 30M iOS users plus 1M new Android users in 12 hours.[0]
Instagram is the main mobile photo app. With this purchase, Facebook strengthens their mobile position the way Google strengthened their content position with YT. The acquisitions are very similar.
(edited for a stronger point)
[0]http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/07/instagr...
Instagram doesn't have more users than Facebook. Hell, it doesn't even have more users than Flickr (51m) or Photobucket (50m).
Instagram is a small part of the web photo ecosystem.
It's a very peculiar play by Facebook, and not at all comparable to Google & YouTube other than the fact that Google acquired YouTube, and Facebook acquired Instagram. Instagram represents a diversification of Facebook's offering, and one which says "it's cheaper for us to spend $1bn acquiring Instagram than it is to make a compelling mobile photo app to usurp them".
And to go further: I have a Flickr account, I have some Picasa galleries.. I rarely visit those sites except to upload a batch and then go elsewhere.
I use Instagram 5-10 times daily when in transit, on lunch, while watching TV, etc...
Facebook have got 721m users and all the data they need to constitute incredible market research. In twelve months if Facebook couldn't build an app which is competitive to Instagram, and get it installed with ~5.5% of their user-base, I'd be really fucking worried.
Also consider this: Twitter add "Photos" to their filtering options adjacent to "Connect" and "Discover". So you can just click a Photo button and see all your connections' photographs in a stream. Oops, they just went halfway towards creating most people's Instagram experience.
Damn reading comprehension. ;)
To go a step further, consider: Flickr is available on every device (computer or phone) with an internet connection . Instagram was iOS-exclusive until a week or two ago, and yet it managed to reach sixty percent of Flickr's user base size. That's astounding.
--does Android's Camera app have social sharing features?
--does it provide some kind of cloud-based sharing support?
I see the above, plus Instagram's 30M+ user base, as their main benefits.
Here's a screen shot of the sharing options shared via Dropbox.
It's a little faded because the screen shot button combo includes the back button on my phone... not the greatest design.
You don't expect Instagram to double its user base within a year? Maybe even more?
In that it was a startup acquired by a big company? Yep.
> When Google bought YT it was a small team of people and a pretty nascent product that people really loved, and the usage numbers were out of control.
Like most startup acquisitions, the team size is relatively small and there is significant traction in the market with headroom to mature their footprint.
> They left the product mostly untouched and let it grow on its own. Though there was major criticism at the time, it is one of the best tech acquisitions of the past decade.
This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade. YouTube helped to propel Google into content. It also helped to commoditise web video in a massive way: reminiscent of the way which Google commoditised search (YouTube is probably just short of being a byword for online video at this point).
Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services. Photography has been around on the web in meaningful ways for a long time. Flickr lost out to Facebook in the community stakes, and Instagram is doing great in whatever-the-fuck market it's in (the share-to-my-twitter-followers market?), but this is not Google acquiring YouTube.
Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022.