The Facebookification of Instagram - The Verge
Our podcast Land of the Giants explores the challenges Instagram faced as it adapted to life at Facebook after being acquired for $1 billion.
When Facebook made a bid to buy Instagram in 2012 for a record-setting $1 billion, many people thought Mark Zuckerberg was making a mistake.
But purchasing Instagram turned out to be one of the best tech acquisitions of all time, helping secure Facebook’s dominance in social media for years to come. It did that by quickly imprinting its influence on the famously simple photo-sharing app, adding new features that helped it grow to over 1 billion users.
This kind of change could be controversial, even internally. Case in point: some early employees resisted getting rid of Instagram’s old requirement that every photo on the app had to be square-shaped.
“It sounds so small now, but at the time, it was a sacred cow of the company,” said Instagram co-head of product Ashley Yuki.
Today, Instagram is still grappling with the challenge of keeping up with its social media competition — namely, TikTok — while trying not to lose the original quality that made the app special in the first place.
Rating: 5