Instagram, one of my most favorite social networking sites is ranked as the 3 most popular social networks among teens! First of all, what is Instagram? Instagram is a website where you can share pictures, videos, comment back and fourth and even follow and like other users posts. In October 2010, only 3 years ago, this online site was created and developed by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger from San Francisco. The site became very popular and by December 2010, the Instagram community had over 100 million users. On January 2011, Krieger and Systrom gave the opportunity to the users for their photos and videos to be recognized and added hashtags. Users could now "hashtag" words and sentences so that when other users searched up a specific interest, there was a chance for their posts to be recognized. With such popularity and growth, on February 2, 2011, Instagram had raised over $7 million from several different investors, such as Adam D'Angelo, and Benchmark Capital.

 In August 2011, Instagram reached an impressive number of photo downloads on the site; 150 million photos were uploaded. To add to that, the Instagram community grew to over 10 million users later in 2011. Later that year, Instagram launched several Apps for different phones (Iphone, Android) and was surprisingly downloaded more than one millionn times that same day it was released. It was the 5th app to reach one million ratings on Google Play! In December, Instagram was rated Iphones App of the Year!

However, on April 12, 2012, Facebook made a deal with the founders of Instagram and later bought Instagram for a total price of $300 million in cash and 23 million shares of stock. But, is the site really worth $300 million dollars? This new purchase did not affect the Instragram users though; by July 2012, the site reached 80 million users and it just kept growing and changing to bigger and better things. The next month, Instagram updated their site and launched Photo Maps so that users were able to geographically located on a map on the site where the photo or video was taken. On November 5th, 2012, Instagram created Profiles on the web so that users were able to locate their profile not only on their smart phone app, but also on their desktop computer! This big change got a lot of good feedback and Instagrammers loved this new update. I love it because it's not only another way to access Instagram, but it enlarges the pictures or posts I'm searching. Sometimes you can't always read the little writing on the pictures from a small screen on a cell phone!

Instagram was being used worldwide, meaning that not everyone using Instagram spoke English. So, on December 2012, they made an update making Instagram compatible in 25 different languages to give users all around the world who were interested the opportunity to use this site! However, a huge controversy had struck. In 2013, after many investigations and follow ups, Instagram found out that many users, mainly from the United States were posting photos of illegal drugs in hopes of selling them to different users from the site. After this incident, they banned any hashtags involving illicit drugs or anything in that manner to forbid this from happening again!

 Instagram today has become so popular and has gained over 150 million people. I have the Instagram App on my iPhone and I go on it ATLEAST 5 times a day. I'm constantly scrolling through my news feed looking at my friends posts, or even searching for pictures looking at animals or even historic places. You can search up anything from quotes, recipes, pictures of animals, tutorials, and even pictures of countries! It's such a great site to keep in touch with friends and family and share photos from where you are or what you're doing! Do you guys feel the same way? Are you guys hooked on Instagram like myself?

We're almost at the most popular social network!! Tune in next week to find out the 2nd most popular site! 

http://mashable.com/2013/08/16/teens-social-media-chart/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram
http://instagram.com/press/