Disappointments are like McDonalds’ meals. They come in small, medium and large. Small ones, like realising that in a year or two you’ll be 30 and have nothing to show for it except a big belly. Medium ones like the news that of all the seven billion-plus humans on this planet, Ashton Kutcher—the guy famous for marrying a famous woman—is playing Steve Jobs and will certainly say the immortal line, “Stay hungry, stay foolish”. And big disappointments like the creepy guy from Facebook buying Instagram a week after you joined it.
For the uninitiated, Instagram is a photo-sharing app. Users upload their photos and apply a digital filer to them. Then they can be shared with followers. It also allows users to find great photos by browsing the millions of photos that it’s users are posting. In a way it’s like Twitter. In terms of popularity, Instagram is to social networks what Angry Birds is to games. That’s because, like Angry Birds, Instagram launched first on iOS devices in October 2010. By December 2010, it had one million users. By September 2011, it passed 10 million users. By this April, when it launched on Android, it had 30 million registered users posting upwards of 150 million photos. On Android, it proved so popular that it crossed one million downloads within 12 hours.
That was the problem facing Mark Zuckerberg in the eye. For a network that has 845 million users at the last count, 30-40 million is small change. But what FB feared was that each of its users either already have a smartphone, or will get one in the near future. And when they get one, the smartphone will most probably be on Android, iOS or other OS like Windows Phone, for which Instagram would undoubtedly release an app sooner or later. And then they will discover that Instagram is better at the one thing most people go to FB in the first place—photo sharing. To make matters worse, FB is bad on mobile. Om Malik of the GigaOm blog put it very well when he wrote, “FB was scared and knew that for the first time in its life it had a competitor that could not only eat it’s lunch, but also destroy it’s future prospects”.
FB astonished self-styled tech pundits by announcing the acquisition out of the blue, and by the amount it paid. But in the process, it raised two important questions. One, are FB’s days counted, judging by outraged Instagram users who deleted their accounts, including yours truly. Second, if people are willing to pay a billion dollars for an 18-month old company with 13 employees, does it mean that we are in the second tech bubble that will burst any moment taking many of our favourite tech companies into the black hole.
But then again, look at the silver linings. That belly is the best stand for your iPad when you are on the couch. Kutcher will die at the end of the movie. And FB didn’t buy Twitter.
The writer is a tech geek
Email: articles@theadarsh.net