Instagram is an online application that allows users to share stories, videos, and photos and navigate through the use of hashtags. The name itself is a combination of Instant Camera + Telegram.  In October of 2010, the app was born and officially became available in the iOS app store. Instagram continued to flourish and gain popularity in ratings and number of users which made it an attractive venture for big business.  In April of 2012 Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars. I’ve included an interview with the mogul and founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom here.  The need for growing social platforms came with the boom of Facebook and Twitter, and with the success of the application Burbn created by Systrom and his co-founder Mike Krieger lead to the birth of Instagram.  A more in depth history can also be found here.  From the beginning, Instagram has been a booming social platform with over one million followers within the first year of launching the application, and those numbers only continue to competitively rise.

The first version of any application is sincerely different from the subsequent ones, and Instagram has continued to add components for the users to utilize.  However, at the beginning of Instagram’s run, it was seen as a “filter app” for editing pictures and navigating through the viewing of photos.  Instagram has continued to add features, such as 24 hour long “stories” to which users can post to their followers to view for that window of time.  Instagram now allows you to directly message other users and send posts back and forth.  As you will see in the “how-to” video for Instagram, the application requires considerable navigation skills and wherewithal to be literate through the app.  Instagram continues to go through a metamorphosis of sorts that keeps users engaged in new features, nearly all of which were not available at the start of the application.