Читать книгу Instagram - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 12

Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger initially began working together on an app in 2010, but it was not focused on photography at all. Rather, inspired by the emergence of location-based check-in apps, the pair were developing a Foursquare competitor, a check-in app called Burbn, based on locating and sharing details of the best bourbon locations. After realizing their app was unlikely to compete with a glut of locative media apps, the two completely stripped their work back to photos, comments and likes with an optional check-in (Swisher 2013).

After experimenting with a number of designs and names, the two settled on Instagram. As Systrom (2011) recalls, they ‘renamed because we felt it better captured what you were doing – an instant telegram of sorts. It also sounded camera-y.’ While Instagram is well known as an app which changed photography, it’s worth remembering that the immediacy of ‘instant’ was the most important thing at the beginning. The communication that photography allowed, rather than fidelity to the photographic form, is at the very root of the platform’s success. When the app began testing in July 2010, the icon was originally a rendering of an existing instant Polaroid camera, but the complexity of this icon, and potential copyright issues, meant a memorable image was needed. The iconic Instagram app design – which was still broadly inspired by a polaroid camera – was thus designed by Cole Rise and was largely unchanged for the first four years of Instagram (Heath 2014). Cole Rise was also responsible for seven of the original Instagram filters including, unsurprisingly, Rise. Instagram officially launched in the Apple App Store on 6 October 2010, as an iPhone app which allowed instant photography within a square frame (images could not be loaded from the phone’s gallery), with a series of filters to add different stylistic feels to images, and the ability for followers to like or comment on each image.

Notably, Instagram did not invent photo sharing, or photo filters, or even square frames. Instagram’s success was based, in part, on their successful integration and balancing of these elements, but all of them existed at the time in other apps which pre-dated Instagram. The Hipstamatic app, for example, was launched in December 2009 and introduced filters and square frames to iPhone users, and was so successful it was named as one of Apple’s Apps of the Year for 2010. In early 2011, New York Times photographer Damon Winter won a Picture of the Year International prize for images of US troops in Afghanistan that were taken and processed using Hipstamatic’s filters (Winter 2011). The big differences, though, were that Hipstamatic was a paid app ($1.99) and the focus was on the experience of taking and editing a photo, with sharing as secondary (Carter & Maclean 2012). However, on Instagram the social experience – of gaining likes and comments – was central, even if the affordances were largely similar (Vaidhyanathan 2018). While Hipstamatic is still available today, it has a tiny fraction of Instagram’s user numbers. In a bittersweet retrospective interview in 2017, the founders of Hipstamatic noted that their app had a ‘major role to play in the very existence of Instagram’ (Downs & Koebler 2017). Nor was Hipstamatic the only competing app that Instagram had to contend with when it launched.

While Instagram had initially courted iPhone users with their higher quality cameras, PicPlz had gone in the other direction, launching in May 2010 with an Android app, with filters, and which was integrated with Twitter and Foursquare from initial release. Showing a fairly public lack of faith in Instagram, Andreessen Horowitz, one of the two initial investors in Instagram when it was still Burbn, very publicly backed PicPlz with a more significant investment (Swisher 2013). While PicPlz thrived for a time, including releasing an Apple version of the app, it was ultimately Instagram that thrived and PicPlz completed shut down after losing most of its users by July 2012.

Another early investor in Instagram, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, made no secret that he was interested in Instagram coming under the Twitter umbrella. Instagram allowed users to cross-post images directly to Twitter where the full image would appear in the Twitter timeline in a reduced size form. This initial integration added much needed visual content to Twitter, but also greatly increased Instagram’s visibility in its early days. Dorsey offered a US$500 million deal to Systrom and Krieger, but was turned down after the company successfully received a further US$50 million from investors. While Systrom also let Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg know Instagram was not on the market, Zuckerberg instead doubled the Instagram offer, with a US$1 billion dollar deal which proved enough to see Instagram become entirely Facebook owned (Shontell 2013). At the time of its sale, Instagram was 18 months old, the company had 13 employees, 30 million users (all on iPhones) and an Android version of the app was only a week old.