What happened when Facebook bought Instagram and transformed the photo-sharing app

When Fb designed a bid to acquire Instagram in 2012 for a report-environment $1 billion, many individuals believed Mark Zuckerberg was making a error.

But acquiring Instagram turned out to be one particular of the best tech acquisitions of all time, encouraging secure Facebook’s dominance in social media for a long time to come. It did that by quickly imprinting its affect on the famously straightforward photograph-sharing application, including new features that served it grow to far more than 1 billion consumers.

This sort of transform could be controversial, even internally. Scenario in point: Some early workers resisted acquiring rid of Instagram’s old requirement that just about every photo on the app had to be sq.-shaped.

“It sounds so little now, but at the time, it was a sacred cow of the firm,” mentioned Instagram co-head of product or service Ashley Yuki.

Nowadays, Instagram is even now grappling with the challenge of trying to keep up with its social media competitiveness — specifically, TikTok — though trying not to get rid of the initial top quality that built the application distinctive in the first place.

We check out the changing identity of Instagram for our 3rd episode of the new season of Land of the Giants, Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-profitable narrative podcast sequence about the most influential tech providers of our time. This period, Recode and The Verge have teamed up around the program of seven episodes to notify the story of Facebook’s journey to becoming Meta, featuring interviews with present and previous executives.

Pay attention to the third episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/Meta Disruption, and catch the to start with two episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or where ever you get your podcasts.