Instagram Hits 80M Members and Nearly 4B Photos, Twitter Blocks “Find Friends”
Mobile photo sharing powerhouse Instagram announced today that it has passed the 80 million mark for registered members. The service has grown by a whopping 30M since being acquired for $1 billion by Facebook in early April.
Oct 13 2010: 100,000
Oct 20 2010: 200,000
Oct 28 2010: 300,000
Dec 21 2010: 1 million
Feb 01 2011: 1.75 million
Feb 15 2011: 2 million
May 03 2011: 3.6 million
May 26 2011: 4.4 million
Oct 31 2011: 12 million
Dec 5 2011: 14 million
Jan 24 2012: 15 million
Mar 11 2012: 27 million
May 1 2012: 50 million
Jul 26 2012: 80 million
You don’t get to 80 million members without making a few enemies along the way. TechCrunch reports that Twitter has killed off Instagram’s API access for its “Find Your Friends” on Twitter feature, which allowed Instagram members to follow the same list of people they follow on Twitter.
We’ve learned that the feature is missing due to API restrictions from Twitter’s end, restrictions that possibly came about over concerns about Instagram’s scale and its strain on data pulls.
[…] Twitter’s agenda here isn’t at all clear, but one possibility is that it wants to control the photos experience on its platform (and preclude Facebook from doing the same). Selectively limiting API access by company is definitely strange behavior in an ecosystem that thrives on API symbiosis. Imagine if Google just decided to shut off Google Maps access to apps randomly?
Twitter has good reason to be wary of Instagram’s growth potential: Facebook hasn’t even begun integrating Instagram into its services yet!
(via The Next Web)
P.S. The $1 billion acquisition price is now worth only ~$917 million due to Facebook’s plummeting stock price.
