Instagram , the quintessential social network for photos, now wants to promote video and its decisions have caused a crisis among its largest users.
On October 6, 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger created one of the most famous apps in the world from San Francisco: Instagram . This social network has not only promoted the passion for photography, but also to share the most personal and intimate moments of its users through images.
However, 12 years after its launch, the Meta app is now going through an identity crisis, forgetting everything that made it world famous: it wants to push short videos and all because TikTok is dominating mobile in that format.
An app that was born to make history
Going back in time, there is something very important to highlight. Systrom, one of the founders of Instagram , was a university classmate of Mark Zuckerberg, who would later buy the project from him.
Anyway, the couple began their creation based on the iPhone, precisely model 4. This tool, named Instagram as such, was launched on October 6 in the App Store.
The growth of the app was rapid, with great reception from Apple users. In just a few months, by January 2011, we were already seeing the famous hashtags that last to date to facilitate the search for topics.
Instagram , from Snapshot and telegram, is an attempt by the creators to remember their childhood with Polaroid photographs, a fact that was also reflected in their first icon. For this reason, it was also common to see square images in honor of these first cameras.
The first photo uploaded to Instagram was titled ‘Test’ and featured de Systrom’s mascot as the lead.
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The social network, in a matter of a year, became famous on the iPhone, it needed to make the leap to the other great market: Android. In April 2012, the launch was one of the maximum in that decade: in a single day, they added more than a million downloads.
Such a history was enough for Facebook, already consolidating itself in the market, to buy Instagram for a billion dollars, promising administrative independence.
This generated a more significant change in the app: while the logo was changed to a minimalist one and ads and advertisements appeared, Instagram would begin not only to generate its own functions, but also to assimilate that of other companies.