Now That Instagram Has Been Bought By Facebook

FRANKFURT AM MAIN, GERMANY - OCTOBER 06: A picture in remembrance of Steve Jobs, founder and former CEO of Apple Inc is pictured at an Apple Store, on October 6, 2011 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Steve Jobs, 56, passed away after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 and is credited, along with Steve Wozniak, with marketing the world's first personal computer in addition to the popular iPod, iPhone and iPad. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)GigaOm: Here is why Facebook bought Instagram

I want Facebook to push Instagram to come up with a web version of the product. And I want to be able to do the Instagram effect thing to my Facebook photos. Not all of them, but those I choose.

That would be awesome.

Instagram: A Billion In Two Years

Facebook buying Instagram is Facebook admitting it is essentially a photo sharing site.

What is most remarkable about the Instagram story is that it has essentially been an iPhone app. That's it. I guess it is possible for one iPhone app to end up worth a billion dollars.

This transaction is a tribute to Steve Jobs.

Pinterest Competes With Twitter, Instagram With FourSquare

Another important thing Facebook could do is give each photo its own unique URL that is not a mile long. And the ability for anyone to embed that photo, if the photo is publicly shared.

Instagram Does Not Know What It Has On Its Hands
Instagram Now Bigger Than FourSquare
Kevin Shitstorm Of Instagram
Instagram Wave
Path + Instagram + Color
Instagram Magic
Scaling Instagram Out Of A Coworking Space

Instagram: A Billion In Two Years

Image via CrunchBaseTo create a billion dollars in wealth in just two years is remarkable no matter which way you look at it. And this is Facebook's first acquisition. Acquiring companies to shut down their product and hire their people doesn't count.

Instagram should have come on Android sooner. And it should have gone for a web presence very early on. Instagram not having a web version gave Pinterest a lot of room. Those three things - not adopting Android early, not having a web version, and now selling to Facebook - tell me the Instagram founders never really knew what they had in their hands.

I hope Facebook pushes them to get a web version.

Zappos should not have been bought by Amazon. Instagram should not have been bought by Facebook. Both needed to stay independent.

Mark Zuckerberg On The Acquisition
Instagram Blog: Instagram + Facebook
TechCrunch: Right Before Acquisition, Instagram Closed $50M At A $500M Valuation From Sequoia, Thrive, Greylock And Benchmark

What's Up With Pictures?

(This post was rejected by Technorati with this comment: It's not news and the only links are to your own blog.)

Image via CrunchBasePictures are all the rage, and Instagram deserves much credit. True, Facebook already had billions of pictures before Instagram even showed but with Facebook people thought - with the exception of Fred Wilson - it was a social network rather than a photo sharing site. With Instagram the facade was gone.

There is just something about pictures. The old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words might be true. Something tells me that even after the world might have moved on to gigabit speeds, pictures will still rule. Because a picture is respectful. You know going in that it need not be more than a split second experience. But a 30 second video is a time commitment. And so the picture will hold its ground even as bandwidth goes up. Actually pictures might expand ground. As the bandwidth expands, people might share more and more pictures. Go figure.

The Color Social Graph Might Work Better For Books, Movies, Music

Especially music. I don't think picture taking is overdone at all. Once Fred Wilson dismissed Facebook as "a photo sharing site." It was said at a major conference, and the comment sent a lot of pigeons flying, but he did point out a basic truth, which is that photo sharing is the primary activity on Facebook.

Google Images, Facebook Photos, Twitpic, Instagram, FoodSpotting

Google Images, Facebook Photos, Twitpic, Instagram, FoodSpotting

Image by Michelle Brea (busy-away) via FlickrI guess people have been taking pictures for a while now. Sight is a dominant human organ. And now there has been talk of a new startup called Color. My first reaction was, how did they get that domain name? Was it not already taken?

So what's the idea? The first piece I read on the topic told me you will never be able to leave me. You are stuck with me within a mile radius. Not even a mile. This world is getting small.

Before trains and airplanes, that used to happen. People could spend their entire lives within a few tens of miles. Some people obviously think we need to go back to that kind of reality. You pick the 10 people who matter to you and you never leave. You constantly take pictures for each other, you tweet for each other. But there is another angle to it, like when you are public and semi public. Then people far, far away who are not part of your immediate circle get a much more realistic picture of what your life is like. That could lead to world peace. Peace gets disrupted when communication breaks down. If everyone gets to speak, and everyone gets heard - see and be seen - maybe there will be fewer fights.

Instagram Wave

Image by exoskeletoncabaret via Flickr

TechCrunch: Instagram Now Adding 130,000 Users Per Week: An Analysis: Since launching just six months ago, Instagram has quickly become one of the web’s top photo sharing services. The company recently passed the two million user mark and announced the launch of their API....... Instagram is currently adding 130,000 registered users per week ..... Instagram’s 2.2 million users upload 3.6 million new photos per week (or 6 photos per second) ..... 37.5 percent of registered users have never uploaded a photo ..... 5 percent of users have uploaded over 50 photos ..... 65 percent follow nobody, and only 12 percent of users follow more than 10 people .....For users who upload at least one photo, there is a 45 percent chance they will upload a photo the following week ..... Those same users have a 25 percent chance they will upload a photo 12 weeks later, representing a significantly stronger retention rate than Twitter...... If it maintains its current pace, Instagram will continue to add a million new registered users every two months. ..... 37% of Instagram’s users have never uploaded a single photo and 65% have uploaded fewer than three photos. ..... This glut of inactive users is common in free online services, as we saw in our studies of Twitter Data and Foursquare Data last year. This isn’t necessarily a lack of total engagement, as users can use the app to simply follow their friends’ photo streams. ...... over half of Instagram’s users are following exactly one other user, with another 13% not following anyone ..... the vast majority of users who follow only one other user are following the “Instagram Team” account ..... 65% of users effectively follow no one. ...... Only 12% of users are following more than 10 people. ...... 76% of those users who upload their first photo go on to upload a second, 85% of those users go on to upload a third, and so on. ...... average time between any two uploads made by a single user is 43 hours ..... With each new photo uploaded by a user, the expected time until they upload their next photo decreases. ...... 45% of users are still uploading photos in Week 2, but that number drops down to around 25% by Week 12...... users who continue to upload are uploading photos at a faster rate as time goes on. ...... users acquired during such press flashes are, on average, more likely to churn than new users who came in through other channels. We’ve seen this trend in countless other businesses.

Greplin is a sibling company to Google. Greplin is a search engine. (Greplin: The First Y Combinator Company To Get Me Excited) The Huffington Post is a content company. It is pre Google.

It has been my contention that Instagram has been a sibling company to FourSquare and Gowalla. It is a check in company. Only you are not checking into a physical space, a business establishment, but rather a moment. It has hit some kind of a sweet spot.

Instagram Magic

Instagram has taken off like anything. There is an artist inside all of us, and Instagram is quickie art work. You give that little tinge to a snap shot, and make it your own. Many many flavors are possible. There is more to come. Instagram has taken a lead of sorts.

Search: Much Is Lacking

Search as is is not good enough. If you can't find what you are looking for, as often happens. The user is not in control enough.

Search is especially poor on the multimedia front. You have to find a particular site, and then search around inside that site, often you have to be a registered user to make use of the stuff offering.

There is no one place where you can go to search through all photos online, no one place to look for audio and video clips, all of them, no way you can zero in like you might zero in onto a map, zoom in, zoom out.

It would be nice to be able to zero in on content providers based on their geographical location. That would really help.

There is not enough standardization. All of the web is not being shown as one search space. Participating sites would benefit. If you make it easier for users to find you, that is good business, right?

Ad offerings will have to get creative if the ad model is to be the primary revenue generator. Tiny ads. This photo brought to you by Coke. Can you say that in an inch in length, and 1/10th that in width, maybe in less? Of course, you can see the Coke logo which, if you click on takes you to the Coke website, perhaps.

Multimedia search as it stands is primitive.

1. Make it super easy for users to create and store media.
   
2. Make it super easy for users to find media.
   
3. Make it super easy for users to share and consume media, to display media on their own sites.
   

So the emphasis has to be on standardization of search so as to make it as easy as possible for search to happen. Maybe content providers and search engines should actively collaborate to that end. And the way to maximize sharing is to rely on the ad model. The average user wishes to be able to display for "free." And that is where the big money is, in the "free" zone.

Say if I took a photo, and uploaded it at some photo sharing site like Flickr, and I had the option to let just about anyone to display that image, as long as I could have that little link ad, that maybe links back to my own site, I would be okay. What about you?

Revver has a pretty good model for video.

Textbooks are game. Textbooks also have to be offered like media. Ad supported. Maybe disable copy and paste, at the author's discretion.

The average web user is going to want to produce content. Right now search is chaos. What is the GPS version of web search?

Advanced search options need to get much more intuitive.

Google is huge. It is an elephant. As it grows bigger, it is going to get less nimble. That will create huge markets for niche search. One size will not fit all.

Redefine search.

What am I looking for? How long does it take me to find it?



Some combination of machine search and social search might also work, especially when the end user is in control as to the degree of it.

It is to Google's advantage that it also provides platforms for content creation, like Blogger.

Just like it does with text, a good search engine should be able to help you search through multimedia without the multimedia sites actively collaborating. Multimedia sites should get indexed as they spring up, and they could spring up anywhere, any part of the globe.

Multimedia in English has been problem enough. The problem is compounded when you demand - as you should - that the multimedia search has to be language neutral. The machine should be able to understand any media in any language and offer it to you in your language of choice. That has to be the goal.

But first search has to get language neutral for text. Multimedia will be step two.

What if you are not necessarily looking for the most popular and most linked to and most visited sites to show up at the top. Some of the best sites for what you are looking for might be on page 350 or worse. How will you ever find them?

The advanced search option is not advanced enough, and it should not be a separate page where you basically have to fill out a form, it should be as intuitive as simple search. You tweak a few things here and there and you are ready to go.

Also how do you make it easy for people to do mashups and still not destroy the ad business model? How do you make RSS stuff really simple, as the name promises but has not delivered?

Create content. Consume content. The netizen demands those two basic functions.

And my pet peeve of all: why can't you "blog" in mathematical symbols? Like you can find chess players to play chess with at Yahoo Games, you should be able to collaborate on mathematical work. Just do a search and find them.

What does the netizen want? That will be a perennial question. It will still be asked a hundred years from now.

Remember that adage from the last dot com bust, that a site is all page hits and no revenue? Looks like page hits are all that matter after all. It was not a bad business model to start with. Just a little too early.

A Web 3.0 Manifesto
Dell, HP, Apple
Google Books: Primitive
The Next Search Engine
Memo To Bill Gates
Google And Languages
Internet Phones, Video Blogging, Nano
Google: Poised To Be The Number One Software Company In The World