Instagram: it's all over

I feel the same. I never understood the people who played the same old follower numbers game on Instagram that they had on Twitter etc.

Instagram was/is about intimacy.

The brands that used it best understood this (Burberry, GE etc).

The people that used it best understood this.

(Note Freudian slip into past tense when talking about Instagram).

I’ve got to know some people much better through Instagram than I ever could through Twitter.

That knowledge was the result of confident, secure sharing of revealing images. Revealing in terms of the visual content itself and revealing in terms of what the images say about how you interpret the world around you.

I love Instagram too much to dump it.

In the same way that I love my football club too much to dump it when taken over by a foreign owner with dubious motives.

But do I now feel sufficiently secure and confident to continue “revealing”? I doubt it.

And if I change my behaviour, that means I’ll almost certainly change my attitude towards the platform. Which means that I’ll probably stop using it over time.

It’s tragic but inevitable. Given that, to my knowledge, Instagram has never earned a single dollar of real revenue, it was always going to be sold. Now we know when, how much and to whom.

It’s an odd feeling, isn’t it. It’s personal… because these things are personal. We put ourselves into them. Instagram is… was… is more than just an app. Instagram was a perfect match for me. I love to observe; to see. It was… is… was… a joyous thing to share that. Now it seems sullied.

Like Phil, I love Instagram too much to dump it. But I am fickle, and unpredictable. Even at my age. It’s an odd feeling.

So… you’re never gonna post another Insta? That’s a shame as your pics were some of the better ones in my stream. Bad times. Where next? #picyou?

Last week everyone was moaning because Android users got the app, which was fundamental device snobbery, and now moaning even more about the facebook acquisition, right so. Facebook will change the app as they look to monetise it but the question is by how much? However, you mustn’t forget that the app was always destined to change, as a victim of it’s own success it already had, it already lost it’s little community feel and had already become a successful social ‘service’. There is a silver lining; it won’t have any more speed issues as it will probably be piggybacked off facebook’s network and it will almost certainly be guaranteed to remain free.
Anyways, all things social and ‘web’ tend to have life cycles – there will be alternatives, led by early uptakers until, again, the big boys buy them up and open them up to the masses.

Dear Tim,

A couple SXSWs ago I got hooked on a group messaging app called Beluga. It did one thing really well, and it had a great personality. In Beluga you created group chats called “pods” which fit perfectly into their whaley experience. I don’t know if it was my childhood of pirate stories or sailing trips but the whole beluga wale thing really did it for me. Just as I began to get my friends on Beluga they were acquired by Facebook. Facebook shut Beluga down and turned it into their mobile messaging app (with no whales to be found). A great outcome for a startup like Beluga.

But Beluga was no longer an app that did one thing really well with a lot of personality, it was a tentacle of Facebook, polluting my little ocean of whale pods. I was forced to get all my Facebook messages along with my Beluga group messages. Unfortunately for me, Facebook messages are mostly crap I have no interest in. This killed off all of the remaining love that had been built with Beluga. Facebook did the transition quickly, and despite my gripes, the Messages app is a pretty good app.

I loved Beluga for the same reasons I love Instagram. My fear is that the Facebook/Instagram deal will go the same route as the Beluga acquisition over a longer period of time. When a “stack” (amazon, google, apple, facebook) acquires a small app, strips it of its brand and pollutes it with exhaust from its network it should forever be called “getting beluga’d”. What is so precious about these apps are their personalities and the unique networks they create. I don’t see a scenario where the Instagram experience and brand stays in tact a year from now. And that makes me sad.

Best,
Justin

Justin – as ever you pip in with some wisdom! And thank you for doing so, because I was reflecting on the whole thing last night and had almost convinced myself that I’d over-reacted, and that it would all be okay.

You brought me round. It’s clearly naive to think that they’re not going to change Instagram. You don’t spend $1bn and not interfere – especially if you bought it in order to get a leg up into the mobile photo-sharing space because you ain’t doing so well. There is no way of knowing how much of what’s been said by Facebook and Instagram about light touch, and not changing stuff, will actually play out like that… They probably don’t know either.

I think it highlights an important tension and potentially a really big problem. We’re always being told we live in this wonderful, user-driven, Web 2.0, bottom-up world – and everyone loves to point to authentic online communities and social engagement as the driving force for the new digital economy — but it turns out that a really magnificent community like Instagram firstly costs a lot of money to keep going, in storage and hosting and development etc… and secondly, it turns out that there’s an expectation that these communities exist purely to be monetised, whatever that means. The problem is that the process of monetisation involves them being sold to someone new – whose monetisation plans are highly unlikely to be aligned with the authentic community that co-created the opportunity. This is where the interests of the community and the commercial interests of the business seem to diverge: for example – around data, privacy, advertising… and ultimately around the user experience and service design aspects that might optimise the commercial return.

I guess that if we cannot work out how to keep the authentic community onboard as the product casts around for a commercial model to support it financially, then we’re left with some awkward conclusions. Is the community from which the product draws its strength in the first place, and which helps co-create it, disposable? Are authentic social experiences like Instagram fundamentally doomed to be transient – a moment between inception and an inevitable ‘liquidity event? Are ’real communities’ even possible in the long run? If there isn’t a model that doesn’t destroy them in the process then what’s the reality of Social Web? I don’t know the answers to these questions – but it’s certainly not naive or stupid (as some were saying online) to worry about things other than money and business. There is the value exchange with users, and their role and interests as co-creators to be balanced here.

I’m not sure we’ve worked it out yet.