Instagram: The History

 Blog Post #4 

Instagram was founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom. Originally the app was named “Burbn” this was an app created to help connect people from around the world by publicizing each individual's check-in whenever they had traveled somewhere new. Systrom began negotiations with venture firms for funding and earned himself $500,000. The search for a team to help with the app began shortly after he received the funding money. The search didn’t take long as he found Mike Krieger who is now known as the cofounder of Instagram. After the two began working together, they had realized how similar their app was to another already well established app called Foursquare. Systrom and Krieger decided to take advantage of the rising trend of communication through images to their advantage and ultimately decided to change the name of their app to what we now know it as, Instagram. The name comes from a combination of “instant camera” and “telegram” which makes sense as the app is solely based around the use of cameras and digital photos that their users can post to their own accounts for friends to see. This name made a lot more sense than the original name as “Burbn” simply came from Systrom's interest in whiskey and bourbon. 

The app was released to the public on October 6, 2010 and in just three short months, Instagram gained 1 million users. Another 2 million users were on the app in the following month. The rapid growth of Instagram was unlike what many other social media founders had seen occur with their apps. To hit the milestone of 1 million users, it took Facebook 10 months, Twitter 24 months and Tumblr 27 months. The original version of Instagram gave their users the opportunity to post photos, like, comment and follow other users. The first change of the app occurred in 2011. This change was to the appearance of the icon of the app which was made to look like the back of a polaroid camera, there were also some adjustments made to the camera settings in the app as well. In 2012 the app was accessible to Android users instead of strictly Apple users. This addition brought in another 50 million users to the app within the month of April in 2012.

Instagram has changed our world by becoming a platform people now use daily for communication. Although the app started out as just a space to share photos with friends and family, over time the app changed allowing for it to become the large platform we now know it as. Through the years Instagram has made many changes to the app allowing the rise of influencers to occur. In November of 2013 Instagram introduced sponsored posts. This addition helped rebrand the app as an advertising platform. A month later, Instagram created “Dm’s” or “direct messaging” for users to use to communicate with other users privately. The addition of this helped create another form of communication within the app that was a more private way of one user talking to another. 2013 was the year of growth for the app as in the same year Instagram added in the option for their users to post and share videos to their personal pages. In 2014, the option to have a business account was added to the app.This helped people track the amount of accounts that had interacted with their page and who they had reached weekly. 

Blog Post #4

The History of Instagram

The invention of Instagram changed the way people communicate in ways that no app had done before. You could communicate through a simple post of photos, videos, commenting on someone's post, messaging people privately through dm’s, etc. The app has something for everyone whether you are a person just looking for a social media platform to keep up with what your friends are up to, a business looking to sell products and wanting to advertise on a platform that a good amount of people will see, or if you want to keep up with celebrity news, politics, world news, local news, sports news, so pretty much any type of news you like reading about, it’s all located in one spot. 

Instagram was bought out by Facebook back in 2012 for $1 billion. Instagram only had 13 employees when it was bought, so it was seen as inconceivable to buy a company like them for such a high price. Many people had speculated that Facebook bought Instagram just out of fear thinking that the app would be hard to compete with especially when their demographics overlapped as much as they did. This was a smart decision for Facebook to make as the app is still one of the biggest social media platforms to this day. 

For the history of Instagram, I read this article and also from this  article from Britannica.