Instagram or the internet bubble: act 2

Let's face it, the sale of instagram for a whopping $1 billion is quiet ridiculous except for the sellers.
What instagram is offering - and it's quiet nice and usefull, don't make me wrong - is very easy to achieve. Easy enough to see that hundreds of similar sites are offering the same pictures work and a free app that goes with it.

I code myself since uni in the early 80's and actively since 95's with the internet. I was selling my Java applets online back then. I can easily reproduce what instagram is offering with a few days of work full time. You can find those image detailing from Paint Shop Pro to Photoshop. There's no secret.

So why is Google paying $1 billion for this company while they could hire a couple of coders and do their own? mystery for me.
Why instagram and not another one? Who knows...Others are a bit different of course but still as good as instagram. Instagram app is not even offering the full pallet of picture tools that others are offering.

It's probably being at the right situation, at the right time for instagram owner/co-owner and Google has billions of dollars getting dusty on the shelves I guess.

We saw the same bubble in the late 90's where people were investing in dot com thinking it was the big thing without to have a full maitrise about it. We all know what happened. Is that bubble back again?

believe they are buying the user base and something about this particular product that fits well will what Facebook wanted.

Its like saying why invest in Facebook when it first started when you had MySpace and other existing social media doing thesame thing?

Facebook (not Google) bought Instagram because it's popular and has 30 million users. It's not about their code.

When a huge internet brand goes into another niche, like with the failure that is Google+, it often fails. No matter how much they spend. People like new things, G+ isn't cool to people, it's built by a search engine company.

This isn't the 90s bubble, because unlike the 90s, the internet provides an insane amount of value and everyone uses it.

Yep, twas Fb who bought not Google, and they bought it for the user base and popularity. Everyone can duplicate the sw, it's not the thing here

Because of the name..

because something tells me they're more worried about how quickly pintrest came out of nowhere than they are about google+ and twitter....

Facebook put a value on the members of instagram at $30 US. That is how they got the 1 billion number. Facebook's users are worth about $100 US each. So if they can take the Instagram users valued at $30 and convert them to around $100, boom, they turn a 1 billion dollar investment into a 3 billion dollar return : )

I wonder though how many instagram users where already facebook users. Probably most of them. I guess if they were not before, they are now : )

one can easily duplicate or even come out with a better code.. but business is not run on the strength of the coders, but based on the brand identity and user base. 30 million users is not a small thing.. and it is far easier to build on it than to start up a similar thing with a risk of failure. What facebook did it right, however the price tag of 1 billion is a little high, but who knows definitely the people at facebook have better business sense than what I have, they would have thought about the opportunity loss of missing out an proposition like this.

its about sealing best brands in your pocket. thats why fb brought it instead of developing such an application which could have taken few weeks to develop however may be a year to get good no of hits.