Читать книгу Instagram - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 25

In early 2019, Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to completely redesign the back end of his core properties Messenger, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to integrate messaging across all four (Hern 2019) showed the clearest signs that the 2012 commitment to keep Instagram and Facebook functionally separate was all but forgotten. While Systrom and Krieger fought hard to ensure Instagram was thought of, and seen, as a separate platform, Adam Mosseri’s tenure as Instagram’s Head shows no such commitment. Yet even as Zuckerberg’s integration plans were being discussed in the media, German regulators effectively put up the first major roadblock as they attempted to enact a law that would prevent sharing data between the various services Facebook owns without much more explicit user consent being sought (Kraus 2019; White, Bodoni & Nicola 2019).

While the technical integration of elements of Facebook, Instagram and other Facebook apps and platforms is likely to happen in some form or other, whether this paints Instagram as more like Facebook in the public eye, or not, remains to be seen. Even as Facebook’s reputation took a battering in 2018, its profits did not, so either way, Instagram and Facebook are here to stay. Perhaps tellingly, though, in Facebook’s first 2019 earnings report, the company noted they would be moving away from giving user statistics for each platform or service they own, instead reporting grouped ‘Facebook family metrics’ in the future, noting there were 2.7 billion Facebook family users by the end of 2018 (Constine 2019). This subtle change clearly shows that Facebook expects its biggest growth to come from the other platforms it owns, including Instagram, not the Facebook platform by itself. In 2018 Facebook introduced a menu item in Instagram called ‘Open Facebook’, and then doubled down on this decision in 2019 when they confirmed that a future update would add the text ‘Instagram by Facebook’ in the Instagram menu. These are further indications of the importance of Instagram to Facebook’s current and future commercial success.