Going from strength to strength, photo sharing app Instagram has passed a major milestone and now has 80 million users worldwide. Announcing it on its blog, Instagram also revealed that there has been nearly four billion photos shared since it first launched in October 2010, a significant number considering that Instagram is (for now) a mobile only platform.
This is no isolated announcement, it was clearly timed to coincide with Facebook releasing its first earnings report as a public company yesterday. So naturally enough, any positive news relating to Facebook was going to be released at a time where public and investor scrutiny was at its highest. Still, going back to Instagram, considering it had 50 million users back in April, the mobile app shows no signs of slowing down its growth as it continues to dominate the mobile web.
There are a few reasons for this 30 million increase, the first obvious one is bring Instagram to Android. This was released three months ago too so it's safe to say a significant percentage of this 30 million are Android users. The second would be Facebook integration. Since people can now post photos directly onto Facebook, it means that the app is exposed to a greater number of users, which means more users downloading the app.
Twitter Plays Hardball
But it's not all good news, those who updated Instagram to version 2.5.1 will find that they are no longer allowed to find friends via Twitter. While you can go through your contacts lists and Facebook friends, selecting the option to search Twitter will only greet you with an error message.
This is because Twitter is clamping down on third-party apps which use its API. It all goes back to a cryptic blog post from Twitter's developer blog, which spoke of providing a more "consistent experience" and hinted towards this type of move. Considering it did the same thing with LinkedIn, chances are we will see Twitter freezing out third-parties from its product as it tries to further monetise the site.
The only way to bypass this, provided you haven't done this already, is to not update Instagram to version 2.5.1, but considering the update has been out for a good day or two, it may already be too late.
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