Dustin Curtis:
I think Facebook is terrified of the usage transition from desktop PCs to mobile. A billion dollars for Instagram, as an insurance policy to guarantee that the company will have an anchor in content creation on mobile, is worth every penny.
That’s exactly what I think about the deal.
It’s not a guarantee, though. A lot of users have already left Instragram just on the news of Facebook’s purchase and many are now taking a “wait-and-see” on it. Like Facebook, itself, did to MySpace before it, there may prove to be little getting in the way of some other start-up jumping in with a slightly different angle on the service and grabbing the short-term loyalty of lots of on-the-fence Instagram users, overnight. Then, what would Facebook have for their cool $1B? Unless I’m mistaken, Instagram is really just a tenuous group of users, not a technology patent or any other such ‘lock’ on the reasons those users are there, in the first place.
@yahoo-MGKMDABPUEAIAYIL5RC6WGE3AY:disqus I don’t think users are going anywhere. Safe for maybe the 3 or 4 cranky users we’re all seeing on our Twitter or Facebook news feeds.
I think Zuckerberg/Facebook sees far beyond this purchase than any of us do and, like Jobs with Siri, someday in the next 24 months the Instagram integration will make us all think this was a brilliant move.
I guess we’ll see. Users (probably Instagram users, especially) can be fickle and I don’t think there’s anything in Facebook’s purchase beyond usage history and user inertia that locks those users in. Remember that users don’t have to dump the app and close their accounts to destroy the community; all they have to do is be distracted by something else (that may not necessarily even be an intentional competitor) long enough to get out of the habit of using it. You can have your app icon deployed on 100 million devices, but if nobody’s tapping them, you’re still dead in the water.