If there is any doubt about the heat emanating from the technology sector, its was quickly dispelled this week by a couple of blockbuster stories. The AOL patent sale to Microsoft and now, Facebook's $1 Billion acquisition of photo sharing site and social media darling Instagram, whose entire staff could comfortably fit in a couple of Minivans.
We've provided here a few words form the buyer and seller, and a smattering of interesting opinion from the blogosphere to get you up to speed and enable you to chat knowledgeably around the water cooler about what just happened and why.
From the Seller
“First off, we have to say that we never expected the overwhelming response that we’ve seen. We went from literally a handful of users to the #1 free photography app in a matter of hours. But as my cofounder Mike Krieger likes to say, Instagram is an app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship, but was a product of over a year of work.”
Kevin Systrom, CEO Instagram
From the Purchaser
“We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook
On The Reasoning
“I'm going to float an idea about why Zuckerberg strikes, what seems to me, the perfect tone. I think Facebook and Zuckerberg really do "get social." I bet he understands that social networks have to develop organically and that the actual software itself is a tiny piece of the overall social network proposition. What really makes Instagram (and Facebook) work is the time that people have invested tuning their connections based on what they do on these services. To ram a social network that users built doing one thing into a different social network built just doesn't work.”
Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic
Their Differences
“In other words, if there was any competitor that could give Zuckerberg heartburn, it was Systrom’s posse. They are growing like mad on mobile, and Facebook’s mobile platform (including its app) is mediocre at best. Why? Facebook is not a mobile-first company and they don’t think from the mobile-first perspective. Facebook’s internal ideology is that of a desktop-centric Internet company. Instagram is the exact opposite. It has created a platform built on emotion. It created not a social network, but instead built a beautiful social platform of shared experiences.”
Om Malik, Gigaom.com
Regarding The Price
“So why did Facebook pay so much for a photo-sharing app? As we've written in the past, Instagram was not just a photo-sharing app. Sure it made photo sharing applications for smartphones that allow users to take photos and jazz them with retro filters. But it was becoming a very powerful mobile social network that let you share the photos with friends on Instagram or on other social networks.So Instagram may not have given Facebook a run for its money, but it was sure giving Facebook a run for its popularity, and on the most important platform of all: mobile.”
Jessica Guynn, LA Times
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