Social networks have changed our ways of life, many think that for better and others for worse, but the fact is that it has been a revolution, and Instagram has been a determined actor in all this. Learn more about this social network below.
Instagram is a mobile application that allows users to upload content and share their lives through photos and videos. In many ways, the Instagram photo-sharing platform has been unique from the beginning, perhaps that's why it has become so popular. Once a user takes a photo, he or she can choose a filter to customize the image and capture the moment perfectly. The purpose of the filters is to transform an amateur or mediocre mobile photo into an artistic and professional-looking image, and, although that task is not always achieved, the fact of being able to edit the photos just before publishing them and with very simple and intuitive options, was partly the secret of the success of this platform.
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Now, perhaps the greatest value of Instagram is the possibility of capturing moments in real-time, it is something like the “Kodak moment” but even more instantaneous because it was not necessary to reveal the photo so that others could see it, so that the factor “real-time” played a lot in his favor. The instantaneity of sharing moments has naturally evolved into features that allow users to watch IG stories, fostering an intimate and dynamic way of staying connected. This conferred humanity and realism to the social network; it was what people were looking for.
Technology for Instagram began to develop in the city of San Francisco, when career programmers Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger chose to focus their Burbn project, a check-in HTML5 (basic web language) with multiple functions, on mobile photography. Burbn became too similar to Foursquare (a web-based service applied to social networks), and they both realized that they had gone too far. Burbn was then pivoted to focus more on sharing photos, and that's how Instagram was born, a name that is a “portmanteau” (pun) between the terms “instant camera” and “telegram”.
In 2009, by then, the concept did not seem as novel as the sharing of photos was a key element in all social networks, which were already beginning to dominate the activity on the internet and were headed by a service as 'complete' as Facebook. But Instagram had something that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or Hi5 didn't have and it was that instant connection between the phone's camera and the media. It was like having a cheaper Polaroid camera with an integrated elementary Photoshop ... The idea was succulent and clear that it would attract many investors.
On March 5, 2010, Systrom closed a $ 500,000 round of financing with Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz while working on the platform (although, at that time, it was not yet called Instagram, as that name emerged virtually just before its launch). With that money, more staff could be hired: Josh Riedel joined the company in October as a community manager, Shayne Sweeney joined in November as a system engineer, and Jessica Zollman joined as a community evangelist in August 2011.
Kevin published the first Instagram photo, in the personal account he created to start the practices of the platform, on July 16, 2010. The image shows a dog taken from a higher perspective and improved with an X-PRO2 filter; The caption, which was written by his girlfriend, says the picture was taken in Mexico. Instagram was very primitive at the time, and little by little, features such as hashtags, new filters, video options, etc., were added.
On October 6, 2010, Instagram launched its official application for the iOS system, while, for the Android system, it was launched on April 3, 2012; That day alone had more than one million downloads.
In the search for more power in the field of social networks, Facebook made Instagram an offer it could not refuse: 1 billion dollars in cash and shares, with the right to maintain some administrative independence, in exchange for total ownership of the company. Recall that at that time, the market value of Instagram barely exceeded 500 million dollars, and in such a context, 1000 million is paradise.
On August 22, 2012, the Federal Trade Commission of the United States closed its antitrust investigation (a usual process in large operations like this one) and, finding no irregularity in the process, allowed the agreement to continue, and that was how September 6, 2012, Instagram began to be part of Facebook Inc. According to Wired magazine, the agreement compensated Kevin Systrom with four hundred million dollars.
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