How Does the Instagram Acquisition Impact Others?

So, it has already been a week since the big envy evoking news. The sound of $ 1 billion hasn’t yet completely sunk in and still raises a few eyebrows. How does this planned move by Facebook affect the others? A GigaOM report had some rather interesting things to say about this:

Google missed out on a chance to gain social media customers and attack a core Facebook stronghold. But Instagram won’t add enough user data to Facebook’s interest graph to weaken Google’s.

Twitter reportedly tried to buy Instagram, and it would have welcomed the user growth and bulked up its own nascent ambitions in photo sharing and storage.

Apple doesn’t make many apps, but desktop photo manipulation and management is one of them. Instagram would have been an easy fit, offering lots of integration opportunities and bringing much-needed social DNA to Apple.

Yahoo’s Flickr is still a huge web repository for photos – including ones taken with Instagram – that could have benefited from a mobile user base.

Other smartphone photo apps like Hipstamatic and Eyeem don’t have the size or growth rates that Instagram has. There’s very little reason for any of the previous group of companies to buy any of them rather than building their own app.

Other social startups might now be in play if the bigger companies above decide they need social media users. But Pinterest is really the only one with size, growth and potential ease-of-monetization. And Facebook still has plenty of money and stock.

The report also mentions a key takeaway that Facebook is still committed to an HTML5-based mobile web strategy and one needs to keep an eye on whether it shifts towards a series of single-function mobile apps as a medium-term bridge tactic.

For more interesting reads about Instagram, here are the Top 5 learnings from Instagram.