“The best feature is that it works” explains Systrom. “You compare our history to other social media startups and it’s been very good. We’ve been very careful about scaling.”
And to that end the team has spent much of the last year planning for growth. Because they don’t want to revamp the system while its under load, that’s meant doing things like calculating where likes-per-second will be in a month—or six months—and reconfiguring the app and back end to support it. There is no Fail Whale or Tumblrbeast of Instagram. There’s just uptime. And they want to keep it that way, even as they continue to blow up.
“To be honest, 15 million is a small fraction of where we want to be, so we have to think 6 months to a year ahead,” says Systrom.
That’s both complicated and amplified by the fact that Instagram is mobile only. It’s not a web app. It doesn’t run in the browser. So to get to that next level, it has to support completely different platforms. And doing that means offering a user experience on Android that’s the equal of the one on iOS. And that’s a big problem to tackle, made all the more so by the expectations game.
- Gizmodo | Inside Instagram: How Slowing Its Roll Put the Little Startup in the Fast Lane
