History of Instagram

Burbn: the predecessor of instagram

Instagram is a free photo sharing application with which users can apply photographic effects such as filters, frames and retro and vintage colors and share the photos on different social networks.

Its story began when two brilliant computer scientists and photography lovers, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, decided to pool their skills and create an app, which they called Burbn.

Burbn began as a geolocation and check-in app very similar to FourSquare, until they realized that what was really interesting were the photos that were uploaded of the places. From this moment, it was when they changed the focus and decided to dedicate themselves entirely to the publication and retouching of the images.

Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom

Burbn User Interface

Instagram User Interface 2011

Instagram: The app that capture all eyes

With that app new idea in mind, Kevin and Mike made a new version of the app and named it Instagram. This name comes from joining the concepts of "snapshot" and "telegram", words that the creators were reminded of their childhood with Polaroid photographs.

Instagram was launched in early October 2010 for Apple devices only. 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.

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. 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.

Facebook buy Instagram

After launching on Android, 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 Zuckerberg, 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.

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. 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 limited duration of 24 hours within a new section. Later, he also added the Periscope-style "live video" feature.

The Instagram story is continually being updated and has established itself as the fifth most used social network worldwide with 1221 million monthly active users. A figure, which everything points to, that it will not stop growing.