Why Google can't build Instagram
Tonight I was talking with an exec at Google and I brought up the success of Instagr.am (they've gotten more than 500,000 downloads in just a few weeks) and asked him “why can't Google do that?” — I knew some of the answers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Scoble's question lands on top of a summer's worth of doubt about Google's social instincts — whether Google can get social networking right and why the company has no game were both live debates by late August 2010. The trigger here is concrete: Instagram has passed 500,000 downloads within weeks of launch, a pace no Google social product has matched.
The timing matters because it caps a bad social week for Google: the company amended its Terms of Service to stop Facebook importing Gmail contacts without offering reciprocity, ending a public week-long standoff over data portability. An exec being asked 'why can't Google do that?' is the human face of that structural anxiety.
First-order effects
- Instagram's sub-500k-download launch run makes it the reference point for what a small mobile-first team can do, directly undercutting Google's claim that social success requires its scale and resources.
- Google's new Terms-of-Service restriction on contact exports puts its own open-data posture on trial at exactly the moment its social credibility is being questioned.
Second-order effects
- Facebook, locked out of reciprocal contact import, has incentive to accelerate its own photo-sharing and mobile features rather than rely on Gmail's graph — the portability fight pushes both companies toward closed graphs.
- Android's investment in motion sensing for Gingerbread, sourced from InvenSense's MEMS gyroscope, signals Google's answer is hardware capability on phones — betting that richer sensors, not web apps, will differentiate mobile experiences like photo sharing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social product leadership migrates to small mobile-native teams shipping fast on iOS and Android, forcing giants like Google to compete through platform control (APIs, terms, sensors) rather than through building the winning apps themselves — the data-portability dispute is an early skirmish in exactly that structural fight.
The trend: Social networking's center of gravity is shifting from desktop-scale incumbents to small mobile-first startups, with platform owners responding by tightening API access and leaning on phone hardware instead of product speed.