So, I found something very interesting in Mark Zuckerberg's post about acquiring Instagram:
> we're committed to building and growing Instagram independently. 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.
Facebook has always integrated whatever it purchased (that I know of) very tightly into the core product, or just done an acqui-hire. Instead, they've taken what is arguably the best way to share photos and decided to keep it as a product that exists on its own.
This is a major strategy change for Facebook and speaks to something I have suspected for some time - they now understand that in order to continue spurring growth, they cannot just acquire and roll in every product. As the ecosystem starts to hit a long-term maturity cycle, other products that fulfill particular functions better will be key to maintaining dominance over the market as a whole.
Let's face it: G+ cannot topple Facebook (though it probably wasn't intended to anyway), Twitter is fairly specialized and Pinterest has come up with a new way to share that fits neatly with the other two. Instagram makes immense logic as a purchase for Facebook as they'll control one of the most important ways people share photos outside their product, neatly roping everyone that uses it right into the FB circle without feeling forced to do so.
Zuckerberg's statement that Facebook will keep Instagram alive and kicking seems likely to prove honest but disingenuous.
Instagram, in providing a photo sharing experience (at least) on par with Facebook's, spanning multiple "social platforms", facilitates user migration across these platforms. In the current context, any user migration between social platforms would (almost) inevitably dilute Facebook's share of user-time.
Thus, it seems reasonable for Facebook to acquire this possible avenue of departure and generally maintain its current state (i.e. Zuckerberg's statement is honest) while guiding future evolution of Instagram's product to subtly guide the flow of users along "Instagram Avenue" towards Facebook, rather than in its current unbiased direction (i.e. Zuckerberg's statement is disingenuous).
Though useful from a business perspective, this sort of defensive acquisition is discouraging to me. I would prefer to see the evolution of "social" in general towards an open protocol for maintaining the actual user<->user graph structure and piping of information along it, with a loose confederation of services such as Instagram providing the content hosting/delivery. This would decentralize control of people's social graphs, with control being restricted to subsets of the shared content and its flow over the graph, rather than the actual graph structure itself. I.e. market-driven services such as Instagram would compete to control portions of the infrastructure implementing this new construction, which one might call the "world wide (social) web".
TLDR: Facebook's purchase of Instagram permits them to simultaneously reduce the instantaneous rate of user migration across social platforms while preventing the emergence of a competitive open social platform/protocol, the evolution of which would be greatly facilitated by the prior existence of third-party social content infrastructure such as Instagram, which reduce the size of the "chicken and egg" problem confronting any attempt at an open platform.
They sort of did it with Beluga- it became "Facebook Messenger" but was never integrated into the main app. At the time I was confused as to why they'd do that, but if you think of it as a replacement for the stock "Messages" app, and Instagram for "Camera" then it all starts to come together.
Good point - though they did eliminate the brand with Beluga, and they probably won't with Instagram. That could change though.
Besides messaging and photos, I'm thinking that few things are left as halo products around Facebook. There's no reason for a "games" app - to me, at least - but there might be logic in acquiring something like Turntable.fm for music.
I like this thread of reasoning. Also ties into the whole "Facebook" phone. If they were to build one, it's possible it would be android based so maybe that's why they were just waiting for the android app. I was thinking Spotify for the music given all the ties to FB, but may be too big now.
Very bold + smart move on Facebook's part. Google should've taken similar step when it approached Path. Am a Google fan, but what's unfortunate is that social would be totally different by the time it successfully builds G+ to look like Facebook. This is should be the time to invite folks at Path/Pinterest to the negotiation table, if anything Wallstreet won't think it's stupid...Facebook just did it.
> we're committed to building and growing Instagram independently. 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.
Facebook has always integrated whatever it purchased (that I know of) very tightly into the core product, or just done an acqui-hire. Instead, they've taken what is arguably the best way to share photos and decided to keep it as a product that exists on its own.
This is a major strategy change for Facebook and speaks to something I have suspected for some time - they now understand that in order to continue spurring growth, they cannot just acquire and roll in every product. As the ecosystem starts to hit a long-term maturity cycle, other products that fulfill particular functions better will be key to maintaining dominance over the market as a whole.
Let's face it: G+ cannot topple Facebook (though it probably wasn't intended to anyway), Twitter is fairly specialized and Pinterest has come up with a new way to share that fits neatly with the other two. Instagram makes immense logic as a purchase for Facebook as they'll control one of the most important ways people share photos outside their product, neatly roping everyone that uses it right into the FB circle without feeling forced to do so.