No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
Ratings18
Average rating4
15
Ratings18
Average rating4
The extraordinary inside story of how Instagram took over the world In April 2012, Facebook spent $715 million buying out a photo app that was less than two years old. Everyone in Silicon Valley thought it was crazy. In a market crowded with new social media platforms, why would Facebook spend so much cash on just another photo website - let alone one with a name as weird as Instagram? Ten years later, and Instagram has a value of over $100 billion. With over a billion active users, it is second in size only to Facebook. In No Filter, Bloomberg's Sarah Frier tells the remarkable inside story of how Instagram became the hottest website on Earth. With astonishing access to all the key players, she recounts the fateful meeting of the Instagram founders in 2010. She explores the company's unlikely acquisition by Facebook, and the internal clashes over whether it could retain its autonomy. And she reveals how, when Facebook entered a tailspin brought about by data misuse and fake news, it was Instagram that came to the rescue. But this is not just a Silicon Valley story. No Filter reveals how Instagram has transformed global society - creating a new kind of celebrity, the 'influencer', with unprecedented control over how we all buy; becoming home not only to photos of pets and holidays, but also to bullies, racists, and conspiracy theorists; and helping create a world in which a handful of tech companies have unprecedented control over how we all shop and think. The result is a book that raises profound questions about how technology is changing the world. Is Instagram really just another photo website? Or might it represent the future of every business on Earth?
Reviews with the most likes.
3.5
Entertaining. In this class of books (Hatching Twitter, Superpumped etc), I'd rank this first.
A good overview of where Instagram came for, and how Facebook annexed it and starting destroying it from its core. As someone who has been on IG from the very early days I felt the changes and it's interesting to map them to what was happening in the background. In the end it's more a story of Facebook and how it does business than about Instagram, but a good read regardless.
This book was not easy to read (written like a 800-page news article), but at the same time, I wanted to keep reading it. Through it all, Instagram, or its founder, does not come off as the protagonist of its own story. Facebook doesn't come off too well either.
