Is Twitter going to one day lose its place to Instagram as the primary social news service? Instagram seems to think so according to conversations and announcements a week ago; however a board member from Twitter really disagrees.
On Wednesday there was news that there is 300 million active users on Instagram while Twitter has reported having 284 million active users. So Instagram is leading (300 > 284).
The twitter co-founder and current Twitter board member, Evan Williams, had some comments that the news prompted. He basically told Fortune that it’s all about content depth, not the breadth and that user counts don’t matter.
He also said (there is a four letter swear word ahead) “If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant. 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.”
According to current news, Instagram is promising that it plans to take Twitter’s place as the social network of record where current news is concerned. Evans Williams is dismissing this.
Co-founder Mike Krieger promised that they will be aiming to improve the social news service in 2015, mostly for users who want images related to breaking news. Also he was asked by Wired.com if he considers Instagram to be a social news service and he said “Of course”.
Krieger also said “We’ll keep developing the real-time current events angle,” Over the past year, the company has built up a data team.
