facebook

This is based on a comment I wrote on the Mashable post Why Instagram Was Worth $1 Billion to Facebook which has absolutely no explanation of why Instagram was worth $1 billion to Facebook.

How can you have a whole post about how Instagram was worth $1 Billion and have absolutely zero numbers in it? Yet that's what we're seeing all over the internet in the wake of Facebook's billion-dollar acquisition. Many people have explained why Facebook bought Instagram, but few have explained the valuation. Explanations for the purchase generally break down into these points:

Facebook hasn't switched everyone to the new Timeline profiles yet, but they will soon.

This blog post was originally posted to my blog at Mediacurrent. It appeared on Drupal Planet.

This summer I was a mentor for the Google Summer of Code program for Drupal. I maintain the Facebook-style Statuses module, which allows users to have a stream of “status updates” on their user profiles and to write messages on other users’ profiles, like Facebook. So when I had the chance to mentor the Facebook-style Micropublisher proposal, which built on Facebook-style Statuses to allow attaching images, links, and video to status updates, I jumped on it.

The result was a resounding success, and I learned a lot during the process. Nitin Gupta, the student driving the project (and better known to some as publicmind) was an extraordinary developer in the true Drupal spirit. He gracefully put up with my pickiness about coding style, thoroughly researched the best code architecture for our purposes, and even identified places where Facebook-style Statuses itself could become more flexible. I truly believe that Nitin will remain committed to the module he created, and that both of us are better Drupal developers as a result of this process.