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It was not for anything that would be in the news, and not for any of the serious world-changing conversations Twitter was about. “We don’t think it’s going to be very big,” he told Dorsey.
After that, Dorsey had another motivation to promote Instagram—to prove Williams wrong. Everything he posted on Instagram would immediately cross-post to Twitter, reaching his 1.6 million followers there.
When Instagram launched to the public on October 6, 2010, it immediately went viral thanks to shares from people like Dorsey. It reached number one in camera applications in the Apple app store.
Instead of continuing to build the app they’d originally promised investors, the cofounders stopped and tried a bigger idea. They aimed to do just one thing—photography—really well. In that sense, their story is similar to Odeo’s, when Dorsey and Williams switched gears to focus on Twitter. Instead of trying to get everyone to use their app, they invited only people they thought would be likely to spread the word to their followers elsewhere, especially designers and creatives. They sold exclusivity to investors, even when so many of them were skeptical. In that sense, they were like a luxury
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And they had to do it via their phones, because there was no Instagram website, making those experiences feel immediate and intimate to others.
Instagram’s simplicity helped it catch on the way early Facebook did, when Zuckerberg reacted to the loudness of Myspace with a clean design. By the time Instagram launched, Facebook was crowded with features—it had the news feed, events, groups, and even virtual credits to buy birthday gifts—and was already plagued with privacy scandals. On Facebook, posting a photo from a mobile phone was a hassle.
All photos had to be uploaded as part of a Facebook Album, a tool designed for people with digital cameras. Any time someone added a photo from their phone to Facebook, it would join a default album called...
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Instagram was a crown jewel of Apple’s app store, later featured onstage at iPhone launches. It became one of the first startups to thrive on Amazon’s cloud computing. It was the easiest way to share photos on Twitter.
Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.
New Instagram users found that basic things, like street signs and flower bushes and cracks in the paint of walls, all of a sudden were worth paying attention to, in the name of creating interesting posts. The filters and square shape made all the photographs on Instagram feel immediately nostalgic, like old Polaroids, transforming moments into memories, giving people the opportunity to look back on what they’d done with their day and feel like it was beautiful.
If Facebook was about friendships, and Twitter was about opinions, Instagram was about experiences—and anyone could be interested in anyone else’s visual experiences, anywhere in the world.
It was better to start with something minimalist, and then let priorities reveal themselves as users ran into trouble.
He had also worked in Dogpatch Labs, where before joining Instagram he’d helped Systrom learn the Apple operating system, showing him how to build the iPhone’s camera functionality into Instagram so that people could take pictures inside the app.
He was livid. The firm was investing in one of Instagram’s biggest competitors and then blaming Systrom for the negative press cycle that followed.
“Anybody can build Instagram the app,” he said, “but not everybody can build Instagram the community.”
The Hudson filter was based on the texture of the chalkboard in his kitchen, and now elements of his kitchen chalkboard were being shared the world over.
The CEO had to change the name of the Spectra filter because Polaroid owned the brand name. He renamed it Rise. Cole was touched when he found out from a TechCrunch post. Years later, he’d launch his own filter app.
The first big celebrity to sign up was the rapper Snoop Dogg. He posted a filtered Instagram picture—of himself wearing a suit and holding a can of Colt 45—and simultaneously sent it to his 2.5 million followers on Twitter. “Bossin up wit dat Blast,” he wrote. Blast by Colt 45 was a new kind of fruity, caffeinated drink, clocking in at 23.5 ounces and 12 percent alcohol content.
Systrom and Krieger hoped brands and celebrities would use Instagram to show behind-the-scenes content, so their posts would blend in well with Instagram’s typical fare—the photos that provided windows into another person’s perspective.
Matt Cohler was a partner at Benchmark Capital, known for backing eBay in the 1990s, now with money in Twitter and Uber. Cohler, an early Facebook employee before becoming an investor, thought Instagram was the first app he’d ever seen that looked like it was designed exclusively for a mobile phone, not a desktop computer. Systrom told Cohler he admired Facebook and
Systrom had been at Google, where anyone with an advanced engineering or science degree from an Ivy League school was a shoo-in, giving the place its academic feel for always running tests and optimizing. He’d also seen early Twitter, which attracted anarchists and misfits, giving the place its free speech and anti-establishment ethos. Instagram’s top candidates were people with interests beyond technology, whether it was art, music, or surfing. Krieger loved talking with Riedel about literature, for example.
that Sweeney didn’t have time to write a detailed description of what was new for the Apple app store. It would be too technical, anyway. He came up with a catch-all explanation, that other Silicon Valley apps would start borrowing: “bug fixes and performance improvements.”
Nowhere was the effect more apparent than with celebrities. Justin Bieber had more than 11 million followers on Twitter. So when the 17-year-old pop star joined Instagram and tweeted out his first filtered photo, a high-contrast take on traffic in Los Angeles, Krieger’s alarm sounded. The servers were stressed as Bieber gained 50 followers a minute. “Justin Bieber Joins Instagram, World Explodes,” Time magazine reported. Almost every time the singer posted, throngs of tween girls would overload the servers again, often taking them down.
Systrom had already decided that Instagram wouldn’t be paying anyone for their content, since he wanted everyone to be spending time on Instagram because it was fun and useful, not for commercial reasons. He said no to paying Bieber or taking his investment.
Bieber followed through on Braun’s threat. But his on-and-off girlfriend, the Disney actress and singer Selena Gomez, loved to use Instagram, and their relationship was all the gossip blogs wanted to write about. Soon Bieber was back on the app, continuing to overload Instagram’s infrastructure, to the point where the company had to devote half a server just to his account’s activity.
Bieber’s following was enough to change the nature of the Instagram community. “All of the sudden, Instagram was emoji heaven,” Rise later recalled. As younger users joined, they invented a new etiquette on Instagram, which involved trading likes for likes and follows for follows. “Instagram’s community of earnest people...
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They would not pay celebrities or brands, they would not overcomplicate their product, they would not be pulled into investor drama. They would play nice with the tech giants, they would foster community through InstaMeets, and they would try to make Instagram live up to Zollman’s ideals of a friendly place on the internet.
“Don’t do that!” Zollman said. “If we start proactively reviewing content, we are legally liable for all of it. If anyone found out, we’d have to personally review every piece of content before it goes up, which is impossible.”
According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, nobody who provided an “interactive computer service” was considered the “publisher or speaker” of the information, legally speaking, unless they exerted editorial control before that content was posted. The 1996 law was Congress’s attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet, but was also crucial to protecting internet companies from legal liability for things like defamation. The law was the main reason services like Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon could grow very large, since they didn’t have to review every hour of
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The folks at the center walked Krieger through what Instagram needed: a separate server that auto-destroyed content after a period of time, to enable Instagram to safely report it to authorities. Krieger set one up.
But understanding the ugly potential of the platform early helped Zollman and Riedel think not just about how to address the problems, but also about how important it was to actively promote the kind of content they wanted to see.
Because Instagram didn’t have an algorithm or any way to re-share photos, there was no natural way for content to go viral. So Instagram employees had the opportunity to decide for themselves what kind of user behavior to reward, handpicking interesting profiles to highlight on their company blog. They also leaned on their users for help improving the product, asking via Instagram if anyone could volunteer to help translate the app into other languages, or if anyone could organize InstaMeets of their own around the world. They published tips for making higher-quality posts, with ideas for
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Adding a re-share button would give Instagram less power to demonstrate model behavior; everyone would just be focused on going viral. Still, their users seemed to be asking for one. Twitter had just added a retweet button, to account for the fact that users were copying and pasting each other’s tweets naturally. Having an automatic way to share posts would be great for growth.
Krieger did build a re-share button but never released it to the public. The founders thought it would violate the expectations you had when you followed someone. You followed them because you wanted to see what they saw and experienced and created. Not someone else.
Ashton Kutcher, the actor from That ’70s Show and comedic movies like Dude, Where’s My Car?, in 2009 beat CNN to have the first Twitter account with 1 million followers.
“It’s a competition for attention,” Kutcher explained. “Everybody learned that from Facebook and Twitter.”
In January 2012, Instagram added one of Twitter’s most valuable users: President Barack Obama.
That same month, Krieger was invited to be Michelle Obama’s guest at the State of the Union, to explain that he wouldn’t have been able to help start Instagram without an immigration visa.
They told Braun they could do it over the phone, but Bieber would need to verify his identity. “All right,” Braun said, “Justin’s going to call you guys.” Richardson picked up. “Hey, this is Justin,” he said. There were no security questions prepared, so that declaration would have to be enough proof of identity. She reset his password over the phone.
In 2009, Twitter had started to be taken seriously as a news source because someone posted an incredible photo there of a plane perfectly landing on the Hudson River in New York. What if the next photo like that was posted on Instagram instead? What if Instagram became the default way to share photos?
Systrom thought it was good practice to be polite and meet anyway. Twitter held the keys to so much of Instagram’s growth. So did Facebook. So did Apple. If they harmed any of these relationships, they could harm the company’s potential.
Krieger had to interrupt their conversation at one point to reset the servers, because the teenage heartthrob Justin Bieber had posted again, causing them to crash. That was a fun problem to have, Van Damme thought.
“We said yes to Facebook. We’re getting bought—for $1 billion.” Not normal. Not believable.
But it was $1 billion. One billion—a magic number, unheard of for mobile app acquisitions. Google had bought YouTube for $1.6 billion, yes—but that had been six years ago, before the U.S. financial crisis. Facebook didn’t do acquisitions like this.
Everyone was jolted back into reality, though, when Systrom explained that the news would become public in thirty minutes. “Call your families,” he said. “Do whatever you need to do before then.”
Some of Instagram’s 30 million users were tweeting a different concern: that Facebook would dissolve Instagram, or incorporate it into the news feed, or simply put too much of its own stamp on the product, crowding it with features that ruined the simplicity. Meanwhile, Facebook would get control over all of their Instagram photo data—which didn’t sound good.
Systrom would tell his friends that Twitter never made a serious offer. In reality, they never offered him anything he wanted to take seriously. Only Zuckerberg understood what would appeal to Systrom: independence.
As Facebook was publicly gearing up for its initial public offering, which would be one of the biggest in internet history only a few weeks later, Zuckerberg was forced to think about the long-term realities of his business. Facebook had made one of the most ubiquitous internet services, but their users were moving over to mobile devices fast. Facebook had an app, but, unlike Google and Apple, it didn’t make phones.
Which left only two ways to win. One, his engineers could make Facebook so entertaining and useful that it took up more and more of people’s time on their phones. And two, he could buy, copy, or kill competitive apps, making sure there were fewer opportunities for other companies to encroach on anyone’s Facebook habit.
In the darkness, he realized this wasn’t just an app for people to post pictures of their meals, but a potentially viable business. The hashtag system for organizing posts by topic made it almost like Twitter, but visual, so you could see what was going on with a particular event just by clicking. He also saw that even though the app had a mere 25 million registered users, compared to Facebook’s hundreds of millions, businesses were already using Instagram to post photos of their products, and their followers were actually interacting and commenting.
