Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day, writing this mic-drop burn about Instagram (emphasis mine):
"You used to be able to say that Instagram was a photo app. Way back in the early 2010s, an Instagram spokesperson told me that it was a “museum for your life” 🙄. But you simply cannot say that about Instagram in 2022. In fact, there is only one word for what Instagram now currently is: It’s a portal. It is a slightly more mobile-friendly Facebook for people who are currently under the age of 45, but over the age of 26.
The question of what Meta should actually be doing to respond to the now-rapidly shifting tectonic plates of the social web is, unfortunately, trickier to diagnose than all the mistakes they’re making at the moment. Historically, the decision to become a large internet portal also means you can’t pivot away from the radically different future coming over the horizon. But I’ll end with this interesting little tidbit. AOL was a wholly different company to Meta, both in scale and impact, but in 2015 it was acquired by Verizon and it tried a bunch of weird pivots. It invested in video, actually won a couple of Emmys, and tried to get a mobile video service off the ground. But you know what AOL’s last big move was before it was merged with Yahoo! in 2016? It acquired a VR company that specialized in "immersive video content” 🤷🏼♂️.
Read the whole entry here:
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