Josh Constine:

Facebook promised Instagram autonomy, but reduced it over time leading to today’s bombshell revelation. Eight years after launching Instagram and six years after selling it to Facebook, Instagram co-founders CEO Kevin Systrom and CTO Mike Krieger are leaving the company, according to The New York Times. The founders apparently did not give a reason for their departure when they informed the company today that they’re resigning and that they’ll depart in the next few weeks.

But according to TechCrunch’s sources, tension had mounted this year between Instagram and Facebook’s leadership regarding Instagram’s autonomy. Facebook had agreed to let it run independently as part of the acquisition deal. But in May, Instagram’s beloved VP of Product Kevin Weil moved to Facebook’s new blockchain team and was replaced by former VP of Facebook News Feed Adam Mosseri — a member of Zuckerberg’s inner circle.

“Adam is a very strong-willed individual” said a source, and “Chris [Cox, Facebook’s Chief Product Officer] and Kevin never really got along.” Between the two, they could pressure Instagram to do more for Facebook — which was important given the impact of scandals and dwindling teen usage on Facebook’s brand. “When Chris started taking initiative and with Adam as more of the old-school in-crowd of Facebook, it was clear that it wasn’t going to be pleasant. I saw that this guy [Systrom] is gonna get squeezed.”

This makes me so so so sad. Kevin Systrom is one of my tech idols. He was a marketer at Google who had a cool idea, taught himself programming so he could build a prototype, and kept working on it until it gained traction. He's one of my favorite product guys who built my favorite social media community.

In a time when Facebook & Twitter have become nothing more than viral, political, and cyberbullying shit-shows, Instagram has been the one place for keeping tabs on friends and spreading happiness.

I'm gonna miss it.

The Verge:

Instagram has begun testing a way to share posts with a more limited group of friends. Called favorites, the feature attempts to improve on earlier social network friend lists, encouraging users to post more often by giving them more control over their audience. If it rolls out broadly, the feature could turn Instagram into the default place to share for more groups of friends — and reshape the social dynamics of Instagram in the process.

Before Instagram developed favorites, users tried to build versions of it for themselves. They created so-called “Finstagrams” — private Instagram accounts followed only a handful of their closest friends. Or they posted photos publicly and then deleted them after their close friends had acknowledged them with a like.

This is something I've felt should be standard across any mainstream social network: the ability to distinguish Friends from Followers so users have more control over what they share.

Ben Thompson:

So good for Instagram: Snapchat’s Stories is a great product that has already gone through years of iterations; why, but for pride, would you build something different?

Still, cloning isn’t enough. The fact features don’t offer useful differentiation does not remove the need for differentiation: the key is figuring out what else can be leveraged. Google, for example, may have largely copied the iPhone’s UI, but the key to Android’s success was the search company’s ability to leverage their advertising-based business model to offer it for free. On the hardware side Samsung leveraged their manufacturing might and long-established distribution channels to dominate the otherwise undifferentiated Android market, at least for a time. And, in perhaps the most famous example of this strategy, Microsoft embraced web standards with Internet Explorer, extended their browser’s capabilities with features like ActiveX, eventually extinguishing the threat when Netscape couldn’t keep up.

This is why it is so fascinating that Facebook is leveraging Instagram in this way. For all of Snapchat’s explosive growth, Instagram is still more than double the size, with far more penetration across multiple demographics and international users. Rather than launch a “Stories” app without the network that is the most fundamental feature of any app built on sharing, Facebook is leveraging one of their most valuable assets: Instagram’s 500 million users. [Emphasis mine]

Nailed it.

So now the question is: what are content creators and social media influencers going to do? How many will make the effort to cross-post on both networks? If they don't, are they going to stick with Snapchat because it has better filters and lenses? Or are they going to migrate to Instagram which has more than double the viewers?

Instagram can copy Snapchat's filters and lens easily with enough time…but Snapchat acquiring new users from Instagram just got a lot harder.

Ultimately, I believe, viewers are going to follow wherever their favorite celebs go. We'll have to wait and see.

Here are the similarities between Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories, broken down nicely by TechCrunch [emphasis by me]:

• The Stories format laces the last 24-hours of 10-second-max photos and videos you’ve shared into a slideshow you can tap to fast-forward through
• Everything you post disappears after 1 day
• You shoot full-screen in the app or upload things from the last 24 hours of your camera roll (recently added to Snapchat with Memories)
• You adorn your photos with drawings, text, and emoji, and swipeable color filters
• You can save your individual Story slides before or after posting them
• Your followers voluntarily tap in to pull your Story and view it, instead of it being pushed into a single feed
• People can swipe up to reply to your Stories, which are delivered through Instagram Direct private messages
• You can see who’s viewed your Story

Here are the differences between the two:

• Instagram Stories appear in a row at the top of the main feed instead of on a separate screen like Snapchat and are sorted by who you interact with most, not purely reverse chronological like Snapchat
• Anyone you allow to follow you on Instagram can see your Instagram Stories though you can also block people, opposed to building a separate network on Snapchat
• You don’t have to be following someone to view their Instagram Stories, which can be viewed from their prolfile as long as they’re public
• You can swipe right or tap the Stories icon in the top left to open the Stories camera, opposed to Snapchat defaulting to the camera
• You can hold the screen to pause a slideshow, or tap the left side to go back a slide, oppose to Snapchat’s time-limited, constantly progressing Stories
• You can’t add old content [older than 24 hours] to Instagram Stories unless you reimport or screenshot, while Snapchat lets you share old Memories with a white border and timestamp around them
• Instagram offers three brush types for drawing: standard, translucent highlighter, and color-outlined neon, opposed to Snapchat’s single brush
• Instagram offers custom color control for drawing with an easy picker as well as pre-made palettes like earth-tones or greyscale, while Snapchat custom color control is much more clumsy
• Instagram currently lacks location filters, native selfie lens filters, stickers, 3D stickers, and speed effects but you can save content from third-party apps like Facebook-owned MSQRD and then share them
• You can’t see who screenshotted your Instagram Story, while Snapchat warns you
• You can’t save your whole day’s Story like on Snapchat, but you can post slides from your Story to the permanent Instagram feed

The emphasized parts are my favorite changes/additions.

I personally love the idea that Instagram now allows for more raw footage like Snapchat, but you still have a little wiggle room to curate. So it might not be 100% raw, but it definitely lowers the standard of "Instagram-worthy" to encourage more sharing on Instagram.

I can see myself using Instagram Stories a lot and then later promoting that one "highlight" shot of the day to my traditional Instagram timeline. It just seems like such a natural and seamless workflow.

Cheers to stealing like an artist but making it your own.

Andrew Watts, a teen, breaks down how his generation views all of the different social networks. Here are my highlights:

Facebook:

It’s dead to us. Facebook is something we all got in middle school because it was cool but now is seen as an awkward family dinner party we can't really leave.

Instagram:

Facebook gets all of the photos we took — the good, the bad, etc—while Instagram just gets the one that really summed up the event we went to. It is much more selective, and honestly people spend more time on the captions to make them relevant/funny.

Snapchat:

Snapchat is a somewhat intimate network of friends who I don't care if they see me at a party having fun. [...]

There aren't likes you have to worry about or comments—it’s all taken away. Snapchat has a lot less social pressure attached to it compared to every other popular social media network out there. This is what makes it so addicting and liberating. If I don’t get any likes on my Instagram photo or Facebook post within 15 minutes you can sure bet I'll delete it. Snapchat isn't like that at all and really focuses on creating the Story of a day in your life, not some filtered/altered/handpicked highlight. It’s the real you.

Tumblr:

Tumblr is like a secret society that everyone is in, but no one talks about. Tumblr is where you are your true self and surround yourself (through who you follow) with people who have similar interests. It’s often seen as a “judgment-free zone” where, due to the lack of identity on the site, you can really be who you want to be.

As part of my annual tradition, here is a list of my favorite apps, services, and tech products that I used throughout 2013.

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I've been using Snapchat for the past few months, and admittedly, it took me a while to "get it." The more I used it, I realized it's a nice way of sending photos to close friends for those "Hey I saw this and thought of you" -type moments

But then I started adding more friends. And the more friends I added, the more random, impersonal, obviously mass-sent messages started coming my way.

Most of these messages were things I'd scroll past if they were on my Instagram timeline. But no, because it was Snapchat, I'd receive a push notification for every single one. Every single selfie. Every single low-quality food porn pic. Every single video from a club that is too dark and too loud to provide any value.

It just got too annoying.

Thankfully, Instagram Direct is here and there are a few key differentiators that make it more suited for me.

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• Mac mini with 1TB Fusion Drive — For a $1,100 Mac, this baby is FAST. It gives me all the performance I need to open large Photoshop files while coding sites, and plenty of space for my massive iPhoto library.

• iPhone 4S — My iPhone is my communications hub where all of my notifications are pushed to. And the outstanding 8 megapixel camera lets me capture precious moments that I want to carry with me for the rest of my life.

• iPad mini — For a few months, I was iPadless because I sold my first-gen iPad in anticipation of the mini. What happened? I compensated by overusing my 4S, which had a significant affect on battery life. I see my iPad mini as my primary mobile consumption device, and a way to "extend" the battery life of my iPhone.

• Google — Chrome has the right balance of feature robustness and simplicity. Gmail is still king of email. Google Reader is an absolute must-have (I don't care if bloggers say Twitter is the new RSS). Google Voice development has been extremely stagnant for the past couple years but having web access to all of my text messages has saved my ass countless times.

• Flipboard for iPad/iPhone — still, by far, the best way to stay up-to-date with Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and now Tumblr.

• Instagram — If I had to give up all social networks except one, I would keep Instagram. It's by far the most personal social network out there because everyone post things that make them happy, unlike Twitter/Facebook where some people only use for passive-aggression, bitching and whining.

• Tweetbot for iPad — the best Twitter app out there. For me, the killer features are cross-device placeholder syncing (i.e. Tweet Marker) and being able to retweet as a different Twitter account.

• ProCamera for iPhone — This is my secret weapon for taking great photos. Specifically, I love how I can lock exposure and enable image stabilization with one hand for close-up shots (e.g. food, lol).

• Facebook — Simply because all of my friends are on it. Most of my friends don't have Twitter so Facebook is still the best way for me to reach everyone in my life.

• Pinboard — This has become a big part of my consumption workflow. When I find an interesting link on Tweetbot or Chrome, I'll save it to Pinboard, which will push to my Google Reader via RSS to read for later.

• Instapaper — While Google Reader is my inbox, Instapaper is my "Save for Later" bin where I'll dump long articles that aren't time-sensitive. Recently, it's been filled out with a lot of How To's and Quora posts.

• Dropbox — I always need a way to share large files across people and devices. Been a loyal user since 2006.

• Drafts App — This summer, I retired my iOS app experiment, PostMate for iPhone. Drafts shares the same workflow as PostMate for quickly drafting and sharing text, but supports a lot more external apps/services.

• Backblaze — online backup solution. This thing has saved my ass a few times this year.

• Bitcasa — infinite online storage. It's still in beta but I've been dumping a TON of stuff on here. I don't put anything mission critical on here because it hasn't earned that much of my trust yet, but for now, I use it to store things like movies, TV shows, etc.

• Imgur — Tumblr used to be a very important source of entertainment for me but I figured out that 90% of viral posts on Tumblr come from Imgur. Now I just go straight to the source.

Honorable Mentions: ForkLift for Mac, DayOne, Slingbox, Siri, iTunes Match, Skype

Heating Up for 2013: 1Password, Pinterest, App.Net, New Myspace, GitHub

Cooling Down: Tumblr, Trillian, Voxer

Dismissed: Path, because none of my actual close friends are on it.