JUNE / TECHNOLOGY
“My favourite thing to ask the team is, how large do you think Instagram will be eventually?” he says. “Usually you get to some large number and it is definitely more than two times the size we are now. So I can confidently say most of the people who will eventually use Instagram do not use Instagram now.” Systrom is a fan of academic business theories, especially Clay Christensen’s, whose “innovator’s dilemma” addresses the tension between serving an incumbent audience at the expense of a much greater potential one. The realisation that Instagram could become much bigger than it is now is freeing, says Systrom; it gives the company the confidence to keep changing. Some of the bottlenecks the company has addressed in the past year are internal. For example, Systrom and his co-founder Mike Krieger realised one of the primary holdups was their own decision-making. So in the past three months, they started holding meetings in which they just make a host of decisions. Other bottlenecks involved technical fixes. More than 80 per cent of Instagram’s users are now outside the United States and the service is growing especially quickly in parts of Asia and South America that are dogged by underpowered Android phones and slow cellular networks. A huge part of Instagram’s engineering efforts are devoted to making its Android app work better outside the US. After Instagram began Stories – the video slideshow feature it copied from Snapchat – it spent a month
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adding speed improvements for international markets. “We consistently find that performance improvements lead to usage improvements at the level of what a new feature would add,” says Krieger. And then there’s Instagram’s decision to incorporate features developed by Snapchat, about which Systrom is unapologetic. He credits Snapchat with creating Stories but argues it is not merely a feature but a new digital format that can be broadly reinterpreted across different products. “I don’t know much about the history of cars but let’s say the Model T was the first car,” he says. “What do you think the first car company other than Ford was thinking? Are we copying Ford or is this a new mode of transportation that everyone is going to have different takes on?” This can sound a little too defensive but he might have a point. If you compare how Stories works on Instagram to how it works on Snapchat, they are indeed similar. But the context of the two apps – the fact Instagram tends to foster larger, more public networks in which people maintain a more polished profile, while Snapchat encourages a smaller, more intimate network – does change the nature of the format. Stories on Instagram feels different from those on Snapchat because there are different people on both networks using it for different purposes. And for me, the Instagram version often offers a superior experience for one obvious reason: I know more people there and you most likely do, too.
INSTAGRAM DEALS SNAPCHAT A BLOW Instagram’s new update has seen a backlash among some fans with the eight ‘Face Filters’ launched being similar to Snapchat’s existing features. Instagram doesn’t seem to worried about the furore. “It’s how the tech industry works and it’s how most industries work,” Instagram executive Kevin Weil told USA Today. “Good ideas start in one place and they spread. We’ve been very public, we’ve said kudos to Snapchat for being the first to come upon the idea of Stories, but Stories is going to be a format that gets adopted everywhere.” Instagram’s Stories feature has been a huge success with more than 200 million using the service (Instagram has more than 700 million users). With Instagram currently testing location-based features that mimic Snapchat’s geofilters and local stories, it seems the battle between the two tech companies is only beginning.
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