Google+, natch. Sorry, this was half of an uncompleted thought that didn’t make it all the way out of my thumbs - I had intended to contrast this with the way that one of the Excite portal’s most valuable assets (its search engine) was quickly rendered obsolete by the appearance of Google’s vastly superior search engine, and contrast that with how Facebook has been able to shrug off Google’s vastly superior alternative to their product.
So Facebook, a company in it’s fifteenth minute, just paid a billion dollars for a disk drive? I wish I had something profound to be speechless about.
One of the reason, I am guessing Facebook went for Instagram is so that Google wouldn’t be able to get their hands on it.
I’m going to make a mint developing an iPhone app which allows you to place calls by spinning a tiny crank on your screen and then telling an operator to connect you to “EVergreen-seven, fower fiyev three niyun.” You guys better not steal my idea!
I’m wondering which one will end up with Pinterest.
I’m still hoping my shares in Friendster and Bebo are my pay dirt.
HMmmmm…
Facebook is becoming increasingly more visual with the implementation of timeline.
I imagine integrating instagram technology into facebook status updates and photo albums directly will further increase the perceived value that users have in storing their memories on Facebook(which translates into a better social graph and by some Facebook magic into a targeted and differentiated marketing base. (Facebook’s 'product))
Is increasing customer engagement worth 1 billion dollars?
Maybe.
That’s my 2 cents anyway.
I use Instagram occasionally, but I wasn’t even really aware that there’s a social networking side to it. I take photos, or use filters on existing photos, then I save them to my camera stream or upload them to Facebook. Should I be doing something else? 
Well, you don’t have to, but you can friend and follow people on it just like a lot of other social sites. You can import your FB and twitter friends, or just follow pure Instagram users. Other people’s photos will appear in your stream, and you can comment and tag people.
I follow a lot of artists and designers on Instagram to see their work, but with whom I’m not interested in being personal Facebook friends with.
Yes, you need to add the photos to our Tumblr and then from there you can pin them on your Pinterest, The next step is to tweet the picture to all your followers, askin them for a re-rweet and then blog about the entire experience on WordPress. Make sure to get a video of all this to post on Youtube (it helps if you can involve a cat somehow).
Instagram may have SOME value for Facebook, but a BILLION dollars worth? Hell they could hire 13 people and give them desks and everything for MUCH less than that. Sounds like somebody is just in a mood to throw money at problems. I do like the lawsuit angle. It sounds like the sort of insanely stupid thing patent laws make people do.
NPR said that instagram had 12 (count 'em! Twelve!!) employees.
Unless they either have some very worthwhile patents*, or a truly mind-shatteringly different and efficient approach to the coding (the which definitely needs to be patented) then I can’t comprehend the decision.
Then again, I’ve spent most of the last 10 years cleaning up after poorly hatched aquisitions. You just wouldn’t believe some of the truly boneheaded purchases I’ve seen. One or two decimal points smaller than this, but in relative terms far more potentially destructive.
- The which, perhaps, facebook was already infringing? Makes the most sense of anything I can think of . . .
I have no idea if this is a good deal for Facebook, but this is ridiculous. They’re not paying for Instagram’s employees. They’re paying for the users.
Thirteen people they are confident will be able to deliver a seed base of thirty million established users, each hot to offer up all their sweet, sweet metadata, not just on the photos they choose to share, but on a substantial number of the photos they take? Users perfectly positioned to receive ad impressions tailored to their inferred tastes and interests, prioritized based on their current location?
Can’t I just, like, take pretentious badly framed photos and apply hipsterish filters to them so people will think I’m, like, an Artist?
I’m as baffled as everyone else. Instagram is installed on a lot of phones, so I can see some small company buying them out as a way to instantly get access to a few hundred million handsets or whatever.
But you know what’s already installed on several hundred million handsets? Facebook. So why bother? How Instragram users don’t already have Facebook accounts? Six?
The valuation of internet companies has always seemed utterly bizarre. Of course you saw the most of it in the .com boom, when suddenly it was like “picturesofcats.com? Brilliant idea! Give them 5 billion in stock!” was a daily occurance. I thought we were over that stage.
I just don’t get it. If facebook just said “we’ll pay each of your employees 3 million fucking dollars for the company”, they wouldn’t have jumped at it? They’d have said “oh lol no, we want at least 40 million each, after all, we spent 3 months on this thing!”?
I mean instagram’s revenue can’t be that high - it can’t be anywhere near a billion dollars probably over its entire projected lifetime. So who were facebook bidding against? Did google make a 900 million offer? Doubtful.
Google bought youtube for 1.6 billion - and that seems like a crazy amount of money, but youtube is an absolutely huge internet phoenominon, one of the biggest sites on the internet. Instagram, a little specialized picture sharing site for mobile phones, is worth 2/3rds of that? Ridiculous.
Instagram’s worth is of course not related to anything particularly groundbreaking, but simply because of its wide appeal. Not that I see how it’s worth a billion bucks, but nobody is saying it’s anything technologically new or innovative.
Madonna comes to mind. People were always saying how they didn’t see anything special about her that made her worthy of her enormous success. But it wasn’t that people thought she was vastly superior to other artists, there was simply a shitload of people who liked her at least enough to buy her albums. It’s just wide appeal.
People don’t usually take photos with the Facebook app, though - so you are not as likely to be looking at it when you are out and about in the world, primed to spend money.
An app that knows where you are when you are most likely to be out being social, what you like, who you are with, and what they like… this is something that is not going to be hard to monetize.
Ah, the Fecal Filter! One of the many fine shades of brown available.