Kevin Systrom might be the luckiest man in technology. That's not to say he hasn't worked extremely hard, but the stars have aligned in an astonishing way for Instagram, the photo sharing app he co-founded almost three years ago.
Reclining on a sofa in the Observer's London office, the very tall New Yorker has the conviction and calm self-assurance you'd expect of someone who sold his business for $1bn at the age of 28. He is well rehearsed, particularly on how Instagram is going to start making money. But what really excites him is plotting the future.
'We have 55 million photos a day posted to Instagram, so exploration and discovery is the main concentration for us,' he says. 'If you're seeing something interesting happening in Syria, or Egypt, we want to give people a voice so they can broadcast to the world. The balance between editorial and algorithmic is going to be really interesting because there's no one person that can figure out what you should be looking at.'
This is all more high minded than most people's experience of Instagram - the heavily saturated, faux-nostalgic photo filters and countless versions of moody sunsets, latte art and grinning children. Systrom acknowledges some 'filter fatigue' but says it allows users to editorialise their own lives.
'The way I look at filters, it's the tone and voice of the moment, so we allow you to editorialise the perception,' he says, giving the example of the film Traffic, which used different film treatments to distinguish three different stories. 'We're allowing the consumer to do the same thing to their life. Increasingly, any new filters we make a bit more subtle because if you do too much to that photo you're not necessarily going to want to look at it in 20 years. We want to make sure that people are investing these assets in Instagram so that five or 10 years down the road they feel they've got something really useful, not saccharine or overbearing in any way.'
Instagram's popularity is notable because it has managed to reach mainstream users who don't care about Silicon Valley hype. Its simple way of sharing pictures has pulled in 150 million users at a dizzying rate of growth, but that rise has been powered by the wider popularity of apps and mobile-first content.
Instagram's mobile -first service was a key factor in its success, and in Facebook's interest in buying it, given that it needed to show its readiness for the consumer switch to mobile. 'It wasn't a choice,' says Systrom. 'Instagram just would not work on the web if we'd asked people to sign up for a service where they can upload a photo of what they did five hours ago. Instagram is special because it's in the moment and the photo you're seeing from your friends is live.'
Systrom also says the constraint of the mobile screen - often described as a problem for advertisers - is a creative advantage. 'There is beauty in constraint, and the fact it is so small and on your screen. An unconstrained space feels overbearing or too challenging, but we give you this little space and say 'just participate in this little crop of a photo'. It makes it really easy and approachable, and that's what people like it so much.'
Even at the heart of Mark Zuckerberg's engineering-centric world, it seems, there's no algorithm that can determine a beautiful photo based on the golden section. 'I don't think it's algorithmic. It's more about the signals the community gives, about looking at the influencers and understanding the network effects.' At the moment, the photos of those 150 million users are sifted through by only six community staff. Their collections have included artisan Polynesian skateboard makers STRGHT, and Qingming, the Chinese tomb-sweeping festival.
What makes the UK audience of 6.9 million users stand out? 'If we are too focused on San Francisco then we don't understand the sensitivities of different cultures. The idea of the NSA [the US National Security Agency] being able to look at people's data, that affects folks here, so we are here to understand those different things and have those different conversations.'
Isn't it time to put to rest that Silicon Valley cliche about building a huge audience first - and then working out how to make money? 'Most of the companies I interact with worry more about getting something that works with consumers, because if you don't get consumers no one will want to advertise with you,' he says. 'If we were to just build a product for advertisers we would have no consumers.'
It's a fair point but Instagram is in a curious position. The speed and scale of its acquisition by Facebook in April 2012 took the industry by surprise, even though a dramatic drop in Facebook shares pushed the final value of the deal down from $1bn to $715m. Billion-dollar acquisitions are not uncommon - but Zuckerberg had just paid $1bn for a company with no revenue.
Eighteen months later, there's still no revenue but now, owned by the publicly traded Facebook, there is a discreet but intense operation at work to commercialise the service. It is led by rising Facebook star Emily White, now Instagram's senior business development manager. Her role alongside Systrom has seen them cast as 'the new Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg', which is some measure of the ambition involved.
Instagram introduced video in June 2013, though was beaten to the punch by Vine, a rival video-sharing service launched by Twitter. Systrom won't give numbers to illustrate his point that video is hugely popular with users, and he's careful not to create too much expectation around the commercial importance of video. For advertisers who still feel TV is the best medium, both Instagram and Vine offer a constrained video format of, variously, three-15 seconds or six seconds that seems designed for advertisers, though Instagram's first formal advertising products won't roll out until later this year.
However intense the strategising inside the company, there's a carefully composed calm on the outside designed not to scare the horses. One thing Facebook has more than a little experience in is the sensitivity of users to new advertising formats, and with Instagram there's a particular intimacy to the relationship users feel they have with the site. In the wake of the acquisition - and perhaps with fresh access to legalease - Instagram faced its own uprising in December 2012, eventually having to reverse a change in terms that asserted the right to commercially exploit users' photos.
'Advertising potential is perfectly fine as a philosophy but we would never introduce a product just because of advertising,' Systrom says. The format that Instagram hit on - a seemingly endless stream of square images with comments - has been repeatedly copied for mobile apps that do everything from sell classified adverts to let users show off their outfits for the day. 'It's a very compact way of transmitting information, and you can build a pretty good business around it.'
Instagram is growing its audience by looking at international markets and trying to reach new, less traditional tech audiences, courting both Hollywood and fashion brands this year. It also encouraging designers and developers to build their own tools for the service with Open Platform, which gives developers 'under the bonnet' access to key parts of Instagram's engine. 'Once you build a community of developers, they create the apps that consumers want, and then more people want the product and you can invest again in the developer community. It's a virtuous circle.'
We get on to talking about Google Glass, the internet-connected tool that augments your view of the world with relevant information, such as maps, and includes a built in camera for both video and stills. This instantaneous documentation of life is a gift to Instagram, once the Glass app store opens in 2014, surely? Systrom looks beyond that, five years ahead.
'Well, we will be everywhere - on every platform, on every kind of phone and tablet and on wearables, which will be a core component of sharing,' he says, though he sounds as if his judgment is reserved until developers get to grips with Glass next year. Once they do, is there any limit to the photo and video streams that Instagram could power? 'In five years, I want to see not just content from my friends but my morning news on Instagram, from multiple channels.
'I want Instagram to be the place I learn about the world.'
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