History of Instagram, the app that revolutionized the way to share photos online
Instagram is users' favorite app for sharing the good times of life . We all know that in this social network people look better, take better care of themselves, eat better, have the nicest homes, and travel to the most amazing places.
On the occasion of his 10e anniversary (October 6), we would like to come back on Instagram history , a social network that has completely revolutionized the world of photography.
Instagram Story: Principles Like Burbn
This application in which users upload photos and videos, with the possibility of using filters and frames provided by the application itself, was born in October 2010 in San Francisco by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.
Systrom and Krieger, in addition to being brilliant computer scientists, are very fond of photography. For them, taking a good shot required a professional camera. However, as cell phone cameras improved, they decided that it there was an opportunity in the mobile photography market .
At first, the app they designed was called Burbn and was much more complicated than the one we know today.
Burbn started out as a tracking and recording app very similar to FourSquare, until they realized that what was really interesting were the uploaded photos of the places. From that moment on, it is when they have changed direction and have decided to devote himself entirely to the publication and retouching of the images.
Instagram, the "coolest" app of the market
In this way, they created a new version of the app and called it Instagram . This name comes from the junction of the notions of "cliche" as well as "telegram" , words that the creators reminded them of their childhood with Polaroid photographs.
Instagram was launched in early October 2010 only for Apple devices. In his first week of life , 200 users had already downloaded social network and three months after launch, they had already reached the million.
One of the distinguishing features of Instagram at the start is that the pictures were square in honor of the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras.
Out of curiosity, the first photo uploaded to Instagram was of a dog, the pet of one of the founders.
Instagram reaches Android and is bought by Facebook
In 2011, , hashtags arrived on Instagram , these essential tags that allow us to associate our publication with a specific subject. This way, people who don't know us can enjoy a photo or video that we have posted.
In less than a year, 5 million people were already using Instagram. Systrom and Krieger, aware of the great success of their application, made the decision to go for other operating systems. Thus, in April 2012, Instagram has finally appeared for Android, realizing over a million downloads in less than 24 hours .
After this launch, the application attracts the attention of Mark Zuckerberg , creator of Facebook, which only 6 days after the arrival of the application on Android the buys for 1 million dollars.
This transaction is very important in the history of Instagram because Zuckenberg, in a masterful gesture, offers its creators an irrefutable offer: the right to maintain some administrative independence and $ 1 billion in cash and stock . Considering that at this time, Instagram exceeded at peine $ 500 million in market value, the offer was very tempting.
Instagram renews itself, stories and ads are coming
With the purchase through Facebook, improvements started to happen : People could be tagged on photos and direct messages with photos or videos appeared.
At first, these changes were minimal, as the app had its own style and identity entirely consolidated and approved by its users . The app had a simple, intuitive and attractive design.
It was between 2015 and 2016 that the most notable changes in its history begin : the arrival of advertisements and advertisements within the application, the logo renewal and, after the success of the Snapchat app, the Instagram Stories appeared .
Using the same principle as Snapchat, Stories allow the user to upload videos or photos of a limited duration of 24 hours within a new section. Later he also added the "live video" function of Periscope style.
The controversial Instagram logo change
In 2016, Instagram released a very different logo from the previous one, while retaining an essence and changing its design a bit in the mobile app. Since official Instagram blog , they explained that they wanted to reflect the vivid and creative ways the community shares their stories through Instagram and the family of apps.
In this way, the camera that users were so used to was redesigned with simpler lines and the background was removed, showing only a rainbow effect, but a fill and a degraded .
This use of gradients, which is not so common among designs due to their vibrancy, has led many users to show their disenchantment with today's surprise by lauding it. comparing with Paint or Word designs and creating memes about it, showing their displeasure. In any case, today the Instagram logo is already fully assumed by all users.
Farewell from the founders and the arrival of IGTV
All these changes caused, as happened with Ja Koum and WhatsApp , who the creators who made the existence of the application possible to abandon their positions in the company . The two argued that they disagreed with Facebook's deal with the app and decided to back down.
With all these changes, the 2018 launch of Instagram TV (IGTV) has been added : a new section in the profile of the app that allows uploading videos up to 10 minutes long and 60 minutes long to verified accounts.
Zuckenberg's intention is to position himself as a direct competitor of YouTube in the field of video content creation.
Finally, that same year, they also launched the Reels following the principle of TikTok , allowing users to create, edit and publish videos with different features.
Instagram, now
Since the beginning of its history, Instagram has captured the attention of a multitude of famous people and celebrities. In addition, he helped the ordinary people to become stars, or to default that , en influencers making the edition and creation of content for Social Media in a way of life.
The person who currently counts the more followers on Instagram is Cristiano Ronaldo and the second Ariana Grande . For its part, the photo with the most likes at the moment is the one with the egg, which was posted in an effort to take Kylie Jenner's record.
Instagram history is continually updating and has established itself as the sixth most used social network in the world with 1 billion monthly active users . A number, that everything indicates, that it will not stop growing.
