Brief History of Instagram and How the Founders of Instagram Started a Revolution

Instagram is the preferred application for users to share the good moments in life . We all know that in this social network people are more beautiful, take better care of themselves, eat better, have the most beautiful houses and travel to the most incredible places.This application in which users upload photos and videos, with the option of using filters and frames provided by the app itself, was born in October 2010 in San Francisco by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.

Instagram is a popular social media platform that allows users to share photos and videos, connect with friends, family, and other users, and discover new content from around the world. The platform was created in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and was later acquired by Facebook in 2012.

Instagram is available as a free mobile app for iOS and Android devices, as well as a web-based platform. Users can create an account by signing up with their email or phone number and creating a unique username and password. They can then customize their profile by adding a profile picture, bio, and personal information.

Who created Instagram?

The two founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, have announced their departure in a brief statement on the official press page of the social network. They say they leave grateful and excited about the future that awaits Instagram and Facebook, services of which they say they will continue to be users.

The abandonment of the co-founders of Instagram has some parallels with the departure of the two founders of WhatsApp . In that case, however, the goodbyes were not simultaneous. Brian Acton left first, in September 2017, and it wasn’t until early 2018 that Jan Koum did the same.

One of the primary features of Instagram is its ability to share photos and videos with others. Users can upload photos and videos from their mobile device’s camera roll or capture them directly within the app. They can also add filters, captions, and hashtags to their posts to make them more discoverable to other users.

In addition to sharing content, users can interact with other users’ posts by liking, commenting, or sharing them. They can also follow other users to see their posts in their feed and send direct messages to them.

How Instagram was created

Systrom and Krieger, in addition to being brilliant computer scientists, are very fond of photography. For them, taking a good snapshot required a professional camera. However, as mobile phone cameras got better, they decided there was an opportunity in the market for mobile photography .

In this way, they made a new version of the application and called it Instagram . This name comes from bringing together the concepts of “snapshot” and “telegram” , words that reminded the creators of their childhood with Polaroid photographs. Instagram was launched in early October 2010 only for Apple devices. In its first week of life , 200,000 users had already downloaded the social network and three months after the launch they had already reached one million.

Reasons for success Instagram

With the theory that products spread when they are useful and usable, Kevin Systrom, an American engineer, programmer and lover of photography was inspired by the Polaroid style to create Instagram.

And he did so since he was a child, a stage in which, attracted by programming, he learned to create new levels for his favorite video game. Years later, having to decide on his higher studies, his tendency to innovation made him choose Stanford University as a necessary step to get to work in Silicon Valley. There Systrom spent time programming web pages and between them he created a site that allowed him to share photos of the parties he attended with his friends.

His work life was also always linked to technology. He started at Google, later he worked at Nextstop, a small company focused on the recommendation of places and due to the contacts made in both companies he met the investors who would help him bring his great project to life.

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Instagram app that revolutionized online platform

One of the distinguishing features of Instagram at the beginning is that the images were square-shaped in honor of the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras.Instagram reaches Android and is bought by Facebook
In 2011 , hashtags arrived on Instagram , those essential tags that allow us to associate our publication with a specific topic. In this way, people who do not know us can enjoy a photo or video that we have published.

In less than a year, there were already 5 million people using Instagram. Systrom and Krieger, aware of the great success that their app enjoyed, made the decision to launch to other operating systems. In this way, in April 2012, Instagram finally appeared for Android, achieving more than 1 million downloads in less than 24 hours .

Finally know why the Instagram founders really quit

After this launch, the application draws the attention of Mark Zuckerberg , creator of Facebook, who only 6 days after the arrival of the app on Android bought it for 1,000 million dollars.This transaction is very important within the Instagram story as Zuckenberg, in a master move, offers its creators an irrefutable offer: the right to maintain some administrative independence and $ 1 billion in cash and shares . Considering that at that time, Instagram barely exceeded $ 500 million within market values, the offer was very tempting.

Instagram is renewed, stories and ads arrive
With the purchase by Facebook, improvements began to arrive : people could be tagged in photos and direct messages with photos or videos appeared. At first, these changes were minimal, since the application had its own style and identity fully consolidated and approved by its users .

How the Founders of Instagram Started a Revolution

The app had a simple, intuitive and attractive design. It is between 2015 and 2016 when the most notable changes in its history begin : the arrival of advertisements and advertising within the application, renewal of the logo and, after the success of the Snapchat application, the Instagram Stories appeared . Under the same premise as Snapchat, Stories allow the user to upload videos or photographs of a duration limited to 24 hours within a new section. Later, he also added the Periscope-style “live video” feature .

Just then, the idea of ​​sharing images took hold with the emergence of the first phones with high-quality cameras and the ability to connect to the Internet from anywhere. All a conjugation of factors that Systrom attributes to good fortune, but to something else. “Much is luck. But you create your own luck by working very hard and trying many things. ”

The controversial change of Instagram logo

In 2016 Instagram released a logo very different from the previous one, although maintaining an essence and also changing its design a little in the mobile application. From the official Instagram blog , they explained that they wanted to reflect the vibrant and creative ways in which the community shares their stories through Instagram and the family of applications.

In this way, the camera that users were so accustomed to was redesigned with simpler lines and the background was removed, now showing only a rainbow effect, but a fill and a gradient .

This use of gradients, not so common among designs because of how vibrant it is, made many users show their disenchantment with today’s surprise, comparing it with Paint or Word designs and created memes about it, showing their discontent. In any case, today the Instagram logo is already perfectly assumed by all users.

Instagram’s founders are leaving the company arrival of Instagram TV

All these changes caused, as happened with Ja Koum and WhatsApp , that the creators who made the existence of the app possible to abandon their positions in the company . Both argued that they did not agree with the deal Facebook was making with the application and decided to withdraw.

Added to all these changes was the launch of Instagram TV (IGTV) in 2018 : a new section within the app’s profile that allows you to upload videos of up to 10 minutes in length and 60 minutes to verified accounts.

While Instagram grew and was confirmed as the fashionable social product, Facebook continued to languish , with users leaving the platform out of boredom when not, directly, out of suspicion: data management and privacy, the distribution of fake news or the capacity Facebook’s emotional and ideological influence are some of the reasons that drive users away from Mark Zuckerberg’s company.
Zuckenberg’s intention with this is to position itself as a direct competitor to YouTube in the field of video content creation. Finally, this year, they have also launched the Reels following the Tik Tok premise, allowing users to create, edit and publish videos with different functionalities.

Is Mark Zuckerberg owner of Instagram?

Since the beginning of its history, Instagram has attracted the attention of multitudes of famous people and celebrities. Besides this, it has helped ordinary people to become stars, or failing that , in influencers making publishing and content creation for social networks in a way of life. Shortly after Systrom’s announcement, during the first days of 2019, Zuckerberg also stunned with plans for a “new chapter.”

It is about the unification of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, a radical change that could be carried out in 2020 and that would allow, for example, a Facebook user to send a message from this platform to the WhatsApp account of another person who does not count with a profile on the social network.

The person who currently has the most followers on Instagram is Cristiano Ronaldo and the second Ariana Grande . For its part, the photo with the most likes at the moment is that of the egg, which was published with the aim of taking the record from Kylie Jenner.

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Instagram also offers various other features, such as Stories, which allows users to share temporary photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. IGTV, which allows users to share long-form videos up to 10 minutes in length, and Reels, which allows users to create short-form videos with music and effects.

Overall, Instagram has become a popular platform for personal and business use, with millions of users sharing and discovering new content every day.