If you are an iPhone user, chances are you’ve heard of the application called “Instagram.” Instagram promotes itself as a ” … free, fun, and simple way to make and share gorgeous photos …” and has millions of downloads. For those who have no experience with it, it’s almost like Twitter, but with pictures. You can follow your friends (or strangers!) and their pictures that they post will appear on your public timeline.
On April 3, Instagram officially opened it’s doors to the Android world. Following that release, Instagram saw approximately 1 million downloads within the first 12 hours. That’s in addition to the over 30 million downloads the app has seen in the last 18 months.
If opening it’s doors to Android wasn’t enough, yesterday, Facebook Inc, announced that they would be buying Instagram for, get this…$1 billion dollars in cash and stock. It’s rumored that Facebook Inc, purchased Instagram in order to keep a competitor such as Google from purchasing it.
For those Instagrammers fearful of what may come of Instagram after being purchased by Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, was quoted as saying, “”We need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.”
“Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people,” Zuckerberg said.
In my opinion, something like this was bound to happen given the popularity of the application. While those who are heavily into social networking and meeting new people via the internet, the explosion in popularity of Instagram will appeal to you. For others, who prefer a more intimate atmosphere for there social networking, it may be a turn off that Instagram is becoming more and more widely used. It is already used by several companies to promote their product, so being purchased by Facebook may only add to that, given the capabilities of Facebook to make connections between people.
Now, a company could post it's graphs or something similar on Instagram for it's employers to see during a meeting, or could use Instagram to announce the hiring of new employees and feature their picture, while providing the link to everyone who has that employer listed on their Facebook page. It simply is providing another way for people to communicate with each other socially in the corporate and public sector.
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