Instagram has become a highly popular mobile application to share photos with your friends. The app already has 100 million users registered.
Instagram has become so popular that Facebook recently bought them for a cool $1 billion – actually less now that Facebook stock has tanked.
Some industry experts have pointed out that Facebook could run into trouble long term because it is basically a web company, and is not really a mobile company at heart. Other companies in the same space, such as Twitter and Instagram, were originally mobile app companies.
So, Facebook bought Instagram, in part to solve its mobile problem. However, just buying Instagram doesn’t make Facebook a good mobile company right away. This month, we have started to see how Facebook is trying to alter Instagram to look and act more like Facebook, with the launch of Instagram Pages. This is essentially a website for Instagram.
Facebook essentially is trying to recreate Instagram as it might have been in 2006. Instagram would have become a website from the start, and then an Apple app would have followed later. The problem, some say, is that Facebook does not understand what made Instagram so cool.
It was the fact that it was a mobile app from the start to share photos with friends and comment on them. The web just isn’t cool anymore. Mobile apps are. Instagram was not meant to be from the start to be this big site where anyone could go through your photo history. Creepy!
Facebook also is not allowing your Twitter handle to be linked to in Twitter when you try to share a photo from Instagram to Twitter. Facebook is slowly eating away at what made Instagram so hip. If it keeps up, users may decide that Instagram isn’t a ‘thing’ anymore and will move on to something else.