Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Week 2 BOC : Instagram

Social Media has taken over our lives. One way we know this to be true is that Facebook.com has over 300 million subscribers. Since the Internet is always changing, it is important for a company as large as Facebook to keep up with the times. On April 10,2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1B, and for good reason. Facebook is known for being a place where you can put pictures of you or whatever you want, onto your own personal web-space for everyone to see. Since Instagram is a mobile app that allows you to modify pictures that you have taken on a mobile device, it would only seem natural for Facebook to acquire this technology to make their interface even more user-friendly (especially since Instagram already has 30 million users).

This acquisition however has caused a lot of fuss because people are concerned that Facebook will take over the app and make it their own, however that is not the case. According to Matthew Panzarino, the News and Apple Editor of TheNextWeb.com, “The users get a better experience. Facebook gets more data. Users that are quitting Instagram because the service may be ‘ruined’ are barking up the wrong tree. Facebook sees the value in the network as it is, a photo creation machine with a lot of user love.”

Another concern that the Instagram users have is that they don’t want Facebook to have access to any more of their information. According to an articlefrom TheNextWeb.com on April 10, 2012, “FacebookCEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is flat-out interested in ‘buildingthe best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family.” Some say that this is just PR jargon, and that they still are worried about the security of their information… however to those people I say, if you don’t want people to have access to it, don’t post it on the web!

No comments:

Post a Comment