How long has instagram existed
What It Is, Its History, and How the Popular App Works
The story of Instagram’s explosive rise reads like a Silicon Valley fairy tale, with the company gaining staggering momentum within just a few short months. The photo and video-sharing social media application took only eight weeks for software engineers to develop before it was launched on Apple’s mobile operating system in October 2010. In less than two years, Facebook (META) had acquired the company for $1 billion in cash and stock.
But, like all good tales, the process involved many twists and turns, failures and successes, conflicts and synergies, and a dose of fortuitous happenstance.
Key Takeaways
- Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social media application that was launched in 2010 by Kevin Systrom.
- The first prototype of Instagram was a web app called Burbn, which was inspired by Systrom's love of fine whiskeys and bourbons.
- The Instagram app was launched on Oct. 6, 2010, and racked up 25,000 users in one day.
- From the beginning, the primary focus of the app was to feature photographs, specifically those taken on mobile devices.
- Just prior to Instagram's initial public offering (IPO) in 2012, Facebook acquired the company for $1 billion in cash and stock.
History of Instagram
In 2009, Kevin Systrom, a 27-year-old Stanford University graduate, was working at Nextstop, a travel recommendations startup. Systrom had previously worked at Google (GOOG) as a corporate development associate and interned at Odeo, a company that would later evolve into Twitter (TWTR).
While Systrom had no formal training in computer science, he learned to code on nights and weekends while working at Nextstop. He eventually built a prototype of a web app called Burbn, which was inspired by his taste for fine whiskeys and bourbons. The Burbn app allowed users to check in, post their plans, and share photos. Although at the time, location-based check-in apps were very popular, the photo-sharing feature of Burbn was very unique.
Venture Capital Funding
A crucial turning point came in March 2010 when Systrom attended a party for Hunch, a startup based in Silicon Valley. At the party, Systrom met two venture capitalists from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. After showing them the prototype of his app, they decided to meet for coffee to discuss it further. After their first meeting, Systrom decided to quit his job and focus on Burbn. Within two weeks, he had raised $500,000 in seed funding from both Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz to further develop his entrepreneurial venture.
This seed funding allowed Systrom to start building a team of people to support his venture; the first to join him was 25-year-old Mike Krieger. Also a Stanford graduate, Krieger had previously worked as an engineer and user-experience designer at the social media platform Meebo. The two knew each other from their time as students at Stanford.
Pivot to a Photo-Sharing Application
After Krieger joined, the two reassessed Burbn and decided to focus primarily on one thing: photographs specifically taken on mobile devices.
They carefully studied leading apps in the photography category at that time. For Krieger and Systrom, the Hipstamatic app stood out to them because it was popular and had interesting features that you could apply to photographs, such as filters. However, it lacked social media-sharing capabilities; Systrom and Krieger saw potential in building an app that bridged Hipstamatic and a social media platform like Facebook.
They took a step backward and stripped Burbn down to its photo, commenting, and "liking" functions. It was at that time that they renamed their app Instagram, combining the words instant and telegram. They also began focusing on improving the photo-sharing experience. Their intention for the app was that it would be minimalist and require as few actions as possible from the user. After eight weeks of fine-tuning the app, they gave it to friends to beta test and evaluate its performance. After resolving some errors in the software, they brought it to launch.
Launch of the iOS App
The Instagram app was launched on Oct.
6, 2010, and racked up 25,000 users in one day. At the end of the first week, Instagram had been downloaded 100,000 times, and by mid-December, the number of users had reached one million. The timing of the app’s release ended up being fortuitous because the iPhone 4– featuring an improved camera–had launched just a few months earlier, in June 2010.
Series A Funding
After the rapid rise in Instagram's user base, more investors became interested in the company. In February 2011, Instagram raised $7 million in a Series A funding round. One of their investors was Benchmark Capital, which valued the company at around $25 million. In addition to institutional investors, the company attracted the attention of other leading companies in the social media technology industry, including Twitter and Facebook.
Although this new round of financing gave Systrom and Krieger the opportunity to hire more people, the founders decided to keep the company really small, with barely a dozen employees.
Systrom knew Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, from his time as an intern at Odeo. Dorsey expressed a strong interest in the company and pursued the idea of acquiring Instagram. Twitter reportedly made a formal offer of around $500 million in stock, but Systrom declined the offer.
Facebook Acquires Instagram
By March 2012, the app’s user base had grown to approximately 27 million users. In April 2012, Instagram was released for Android phones and was downloaded more than one million times in less than one day. At the time, the company was also close to receiving a new round of funding at a valuation of $500 million. Systrom and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had become acquainted through events held at Stanford, and the two had been in communication during the beginning of Instagram's rapid rise in popularity.
In April 2012, Facebook (now Meta) made an offer to purchase Instagram for about $1 billion in cash and stock; a key provision was that the company would remain independently managed.
Shortly thereafter and just prior to its initial public offering (IPO), Facebook moved forward and acquired the company for $1 billion in cash and stock.
Instagram made a limited-feature website interface available in November 2012. In June 2014, the company introduced an app for the Amazon Fire device, and finally, in 2016, it created an app that made it compatible with Microsoft Windows tablets and computers.
Terms of Service Controversy
Instagram hit a bump in the road in December 2012 after updating its terms of service (TOS). This update effectively granted Instagram the right to sell users' photos to third parties without notification or compensation. The move drew immediate criticism from privacy advocates and many of the app's users; some users responded by deleting their accounts. Instagram eventually retracted the controversial terms.
Newer Features Added to the App
Although Instagram has a variety of features, most basically, the app's interface allows individuals who have created a free account to upload media–both photos and videos.
Users can then edit the media they upload with filters and organize them with location information and hashtags (a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign that is used primarily on social media platforms to identify posts about a specific topic). Users can make their profiles public or private; the difference is that with a public profile, a user's photos/videos are viewable by every other Instagram user, whereas with a private profile, users can approve who they want to be able to view their posts.
Instagram users can browse other users' photos and videos by searching for hashtags and locations. They can also scroll through an aggregation of trending content and interact with other users' photos and videos by clicking on buttons that allow them to "like" a post or add a text comment to a post. When a user "follows" another user, it means that they are adding that user's photos and videos to their feed.
The first version of the Instagram app only allowed users to display their media in a square aspect ratio (an aspect ratio is a proportional relationship between an image's width and height).
For a square aspect ratio, an image's height and width are the same. This meant that Instagram users could only post media that matched the 640-pixel width of the iPhone 4 at that time (in 2010). In 2015, this feature changed and users could upload media that was larger (up to 1080 pixels).
Since it was first launched, Instagram has also added a messaging feature and the capability for users to include multiple images or videos within the same post.
One of the app's most popular features is called "Instagram Stories." With this feature, users can post photos and videos to a separate feed of content within the app. These types of posts are viewable by other users for 24 hours after the time of the original posting. According to Instagram, 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day as of 2022.
When Was Instagram Launched?
Instagram was launched on Oct. 6, 2010, where it was initially only available for iOS. The app reached one million registered users after just two months, and a billion users by 2018.
Why Was Instagram Originally Created?
Instagram was originally a photo-sharing app that featured several filters and enhancements for photos taken on a mobile phone. It combined features from the then-popular app FourSquare, whereby users could tag photos with people, locations, or other information to share Its creator, Kevin Systrom, has said he developed the app due to his love of photography.
How Did Instagram Become So Successful?
Instagram's focus on photo sharing and commenting led to a strong degree of user engagement and word-of-mouth marketing as users encouraged their friends and family to join. Its simple interface and popular features also made it widely liked. This combination led users, who notoriously have short attention spans, to scroll through many posts and become addicted, in a sense, to using the app.
The Bottom Line
While user growth has continued to increase since the Meta (formerly Facebook) acquisition, Instagram has made a relatively small number of changes to the app, sticking to its simple and intuitive user experience and core focus on photo- and video-sharing capabilities.
Despite the high price tag of its acquisition, the company appears to have been a savvy investment on the part of Meta.
In 2019, the market research company eMarketer predicted that Instagram would reach 117.2 million users by 2021. In 2018, Instagram was the second-most downloaded free app on the Apple app store (second only to YouTube's free mobile-device app). By 2020, more than 1 billion people used Instagram every month.
Take a Look Back at Instagram's First Ever Posts
It’s hard to imagine a world without Instagram. Without the Valencia filter. Without square-format pictures. Without amateur food photography filling your feed.
But that world did once exist — just a mere six years ago. On this day in 2010, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger unleashed the photo-sharing platform that, though they didn’t know it at the time, would soon become a selfie-filled, multi-billion-dollar beast used by 500 million people. Although Instagram wasn’t yet available to the public, Systrom and Krieger started testing their brainchild with a few experimental snaps.
Here’s how it all went down, based on the Instagram histories of the two men.
1:26 p.m.: Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) posts the first-ever Instagram. It’s a somewhat artsy shot out of a window towards a marina, with tilted framing and what appears to be heavy filtering. As Instagram did not yet have location tagging at this point, it’s unclear where, exactly, Krieger posted from. He did not append a caption.
3:00 p.m.: Krieger then uploads the second-ever Instagram. This time, it’s a picture of co-founder Systrom at his desk. Again: heavy filtering, slightly blurred optics. Systrom, who goes by the handle “@kevin,” was the first to comment: “Friday work,” he wrote. After that, Krieger added: “Kevin hard at work.” Little did they know that someday soon, a simple caption or comment explaining a scene just wouldn’t fly.
3:58 p.m.: Systrom kicks off his own account with a picture of something he captions as “Awesome pins.” To this day, it remains unclear what, exactly, the light-up emoji-like symbols are a part of, where the image was taken, or what Systrom was attempting to showcase with this choice of first post.
4:11 p.m.: Krieger, ever the trailblazer, launches the lauded tradition of Instagram food photography with a sepia-toned snap of a dinner table. Based on the chopsticks, it looks like some kind of Asian food was consumed. There’s also plenty of beer to be had.
4:42 p.m.: Systrom counters with his own food snap. Primary components: a fork and some kind of tomato-based or red sauce dish in a white bowl. The color composition is strong, but the lack of clarity wouldn’t cut it in today’s competitive food ‘gram market.
5:05 p.m.: Looks like Krieger hit up the movie theater to celebrate a big first day of ‘gramming, based on this super-blurry snap captioned only “Inception.” The Christopher Nolan movie of the same name, starring Leonardo diCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, had come out just a few days prior — so it’s a fair guess that Krieger watched it that night.
5:24 p.m.: Meanwhile, Systrom’s prophetic third post would set the stage for one of the most popular Instagram categories: puppy pics.
5:29 p.m.: The inaugural puppy pic was quickly followed five minutes later by a snap of the taco stand Systrom was, evidently, visiting. Looks like a Valencia filter to us.
5:33 p.m.: Systrom was really on a roll; he finished up the day with a picture of a companion sipping what looks like a very delicious cocktail.
And so concluded the first day in Instagram posting history. It was an illustrious start, touching on most of the components we would soon see as trends: food pics, animal photos, artsy images, and of course plenty of documentation of carousing. But in terms of photo quality, the co-founders had a long way to go before reaching today’s levels of fastidiousness when it comes to composition, precision, and editing.
Happy sixth anniversary, Instagram! Thanks for bringing us the social media tool that defines the millennial generation.
Write to Raisa Bruner at [email protected].
How to find out when an Instagram account was created: different ways
We will analyze in the article how to find out the date when an Instagram page was created in different ways.
When you may need to register
1. Check reliability
Before buying a business on Instagram (online store), you need to make sure of its quality: catchy photos, informative detailed description, delivery terms, cost. At the same time, the age of the page is important, since young pages are not trusted enough.
2. Check spin-up possibilities.
New accounts have restrictions on promotion: limits on mass following, mass liking, mass looking, advertising settings. To avoid this, you need to check when the account was created.
Please note! There are different methods of promoting a business account. One of the effective ones is the creation of a landing page. In the Hipolink service, you can create a professional one-page website with a minimum set of skills. By following simple instructions, you will be able to create an attractive page for customers and increase referral traffic.
Easy way inside app
Open app on phone (Android, iPhone).
Go to "My profile" (avatar circle at the bottom of the display)
Select three bars in the upper right corner.
Click "Settings".
Further - "Safety".
In the "Data and History" section, select "data access".
In the window that opens, the registration date will be shown at the top.
If you have connected a business profile, information about the transition will also be displayed in this section.
Through the publication of posts
If an inaccurate date of registration is important (since the profile owner could not maintain a page on Instagram), but the beginning of active activity, one of the verification options is to search for the first post, analysis of the frequency of release.
Mechanical search - scrolling (scrolling) down the account page before publication. Under the activity icons - comments, likes, the "share" button is the date the post was published. It's worth counting from.
A method for fans to leave emails in an email box marked "important".
When registering via email, an email with registration data on Instagram will be sent to the mailbox. The date of the letter is the date of registration of the account on Instagram.
Important! The method works when e-mail is specified in the registration field.
How to check the age of an account using a computer
Open the Instagram application in a computer browser, log into the account. Open profile settings.
Select "Privacy and Security".
"Account data" - "View account data".
In the information field, see when the Instagram profile was created.
Checking the date of registration of someone else's Instagram users
There are online services that check the registration of a personal, someone else's user. In the GetIP.social service on the main page, in the search bar, specify the login without the @ symbol. Then go through the captcha, click "verify". The application will analyze the page, give the necessary information.
When registering an Instagram profile earlier than 30 days, the service will not indicate the date the profile was created.
An overview of the application can be viewed here.
The application works intermittently, the site may be unavailable
Find out the registration of another Instagram user
Open the Instagram account of interest and click on actions (the icon with three dots in the upper right corner).
Then select "Account Information". In the first line, Instagram will indicate the necessary information about the creation (when created, location, previous usernames, accounts with common followers).
Important! Information can be viewed from popular accounts + engaged in promotion through advertising.
How to increase sales through Instagram, read the article.
We hope that the article helped to understand the question of how to find out information about when a personal or someone else's account was created on the Instagram social network.
Good luck!
How to find out your and someone else's account registration date on Instagram
Author Andrey Instagramovich To read 3 min
You can find out when an Instagram account was created using direct information from the account or on third-party resources. There are other ways to solve this problem.
Content
- Information on your profile
- Is it possible to find out someone else's registration date
- Profile information
- Services and websites
- pages. To do this, do the following:
- Open the application and log in.
- Go to your profile.
- Settings - Security.
- Data access.
This section will contain all the information that its user can get:
- profile privacy level changes;
- password change;
- previous email addresses, phone numbers, usernames, first and last names, biography texts, biographical links;
- current subscription requests;
- subscriber accounts.
In addition, the user will find a list of hashtags, blocked accounts and actions with History, IP addresses and authorization time in the system. You can also go to the mail to which the account is linked, and through the search to find all letters from Instagram. The desired contains the text "Verify your page."
Is it possible to find out someone else's registration date
There are several ways to find out the date of creation of someone else's account: through the section: “Page data” and using unofficial services. In the first case, the user will see the information that was saved and registered by Instagram. With unofficial ones - only the time and date of creation.
What information can be found on the social network:
- date the page was created;
- country where the user comes from most often;
- previous nicknames;
- general subscriptions.
Using information about previous nicknames, the profile visitor will be able to find mentions, comments, or other similar accounts.
Profile information
You can scroll to the beginning of publications. This method is not reliable, but will help you roughly figure out when the profile was created from the first photo.
You can find out the date of registration of an Instagram account if it has a lot of followers or advertising posts. Required:
- Open the application.
- Go to the page of interest.
- Click on the three-dot symbol in the upper right corner.
- Select the menu item " Account information ".
Low reach accounts are protected by privacy settings and only the owner can find out when they started. This category includes online stores that have been recently created or blogs with less than 10,000 subscribers.
Services and sites
There are third-party services that allow you to see the date of registration on Instagram. For example, GetIP :
- Enter the site.
