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Of course, you can not talk about Instagram without mentioning its Stories feature, which she introduced in 2016 and that is now one of the basic elements of the application. Today, more than 500 million people daily use Instagram Stories, and Facebook is confident that this number will continue to increase, as more and more users are turning to ephemeral (or emerging) publications. disappearance). Although Systrom and Krieger did not blatantly declare that Instagram had ripped the functionality of Snapchat – a decision that would have been ordered by Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg -, they did acknowledge however that The competing application had played a role in launching their own stories.
"For a long time, people's profiles were filled with Snapchat links and it was clear that people were trying to bridge the two products," said Systrom. "By bringing them together at one location, we gave consumers what they wanted." This is not totally shocking because it makes sense that Instagram does not wish that a rival app removes the user's commitment. It's also not Instagram's fault if people decided to use their app instead of Snapchat, although the inspiration for Stories is rather obvious.
Regarding the loss of independence after the acquisition of Facebook, which may have pushed Instagram to become more than just a photo-sharing app, Systrom said it did not see it as a negative move. "In a way, winning less Instagram is a function of winning Instagram," he said. "If Instagram was a niche application for photographers, we would probably be working on this app for 20 years as a niche app." What happened was that things were getting better by better and better and that the size of the business became of paramount importance for this company. "
Systrom added that, in a certain way, the loss of autonomy could have been predicted from the beginning. But, of course, everything becomes real once you start having access to the resources of a multi-billion dollar company like Facebook. "If this thing reaches the size we want, that's why we are making this agreement – autonomy will end up being less present because it is so important," he said. "It's an inevitable thing if you succeed, so you can choose: do you want to be a failure and have a little autonomy, and have all the autonomy of the world, or not?" I think we got to this point. "
Naturally, Systrom has been asked questions about proposals such as the one presented by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), which aims to dismantle big tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. Systrom said that as this would become an important topic of conversation in the run-up to the US presidential elections in 2020, he wanted the politicians to explain more precisely how they plan to solve the problems. He seems to believe that these proposals must offer concrete solutions, rather than simply based on the idea that companies must be dissociated because they are too powerful.
Systrom said any proposal must be specific about the integrations and acquisitions they are talking about. "Is it Amazon white labeled products sold on Amazon? Because it's a very different problem to know if Facebook should also have Instagram, which is a really different issue than whether Apple has the right to be a single App Store, "he said. As we approach 2020, it will be interesting to see what the other presidential candidates will propose, but it is clear that the Democrats are not going to let that happen anytime soon.
"The cliché that every company is a technology company is more and more true," Systrom continued. "So breaking with technology or having these kinds of conversations will be better and lead to better policy, if we are really specific to the problems we are trying to solve and what would be the implementation." He concluded by stating that a "more nuanced proposal" than Warren's is necessary. "I fear that a proposal to dismantle all technologies will only play on everyone's current anti-tech sentiment rather than doing what politicians should do, that is, regulating the real ones." problems and give real solutions. "
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