Instagram is owned by Facebook, right? Yes, indeed it is.
20180905/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram
Instagram was a separate company that was acquired by Facebook. Interestingly, Facebook previously had the bad business practice associated with Microsoft of taking too much control after the acquisition and ruining the product.
The WhatsApp acquisition closed at a steep $19 billion; more than $40 per user of the platform.
That means WhatsApp has 475 million users. In other words, as of 2018, there was one Raspberry Pi sold for every 24 WhatsApp users.
So how many users are on Facebook? It has more than 2.2 billion monthly active users as of January 2018. In other words, there are over 110 monthly active Facebook users for every Raspberry Pi sold, as of 2018.
20180905/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Facebook
Wow, this is it. These are the websites on the planet, period. You can’t get any bigger than this in terms of users. All other ideas that are not related to social networking can only garner smaller communities of human users. Yeah, you can build the biggest machine-to-machine communication network that you want, and sure that can serve some very useful purposes, but it’s still just not the same if there aren’t many people using that system, if the only people using that system are professional scientists and engineers. Matter of fact, that’s literally what the early Internet was all about: a network of machine-to-machine communications where scientists and engineers were the primary beneficiaries, users, and maintainers of the system. Although the Internet user population has changed greatly since those early days, the technical maintenance side has not: by far the most significant change was “commercialization” of the Internet, but other than that the technical and political operational characteristics are much the same.
20180905/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_with_more_than_100_million_active_users
20180905/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_with_more_than_1_million_users
Wow, I just realized that perhaps not many Instagram users are fully aware of what company owns in. In Microsoft marketing of times past, that would have been considered a bad thing.