Instagram yesterday revealed it now boasts a bigger monthly user-base than its social media rival Twitter, but the 140-character service doesn’t ‘give a shit’.
Hitting back at Instagram’s user-base brags, Twitter’s co-founder Ev Williams has told Fortune that he doesn’t ‘give a shit’ about having fewer users, asking ‘Why is users the only thing we talk about?’
“If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant,” he ranted.
“It’s at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter—important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter.
“If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.”
Bigging up Instagram’s progress, CEO Kevin Systrom recently told the BBC that monthly active users of the service now total upwards of 300 million.
That trumps Twitter, which claims to have a formidable, but slightly more meagre, 284 million monthly users.
Instagram has seen huge growth since its 2010 launch, being acquired by Facebook in 2012, and touting a far less impressive 100 million monthly active users only last year.
Systrom talked up the photo-sharing platform as ‘exciting’, promising it would ‘continue to grow’, with the potential to ‘change the world.’
“Instagram is about seeing a live pulse of the world right now,” said the CEO. “
He added: “You’re literally getting a view of what’s happening in the world right now.”
The firm also revealed it would be adding a verified accounts system, similar to the blue ticks used by Twitter and Facebook.
“We want to be all about authentic users and you making sure that you know you’re following real people not bots, not spam accounts, not fake accounts,” Systrom explained.
The CEO also hinted that an events-based feature could be coming to Instagram in the near future, sort of like Snapchat’s event stories.
“What we need to do is figure out how to take the fact that everyone’s contributing in the world and broadcast that more globally,” he said.
“If you’re interested in what’s happening at the World Cup, you can peer in, see the football players and see what they’re thinking and doing before they go onto the field.”
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
