A couple of huge stories in the tech world happened over the past week. On Monday, online technology news source The Next Web reported that Google was in the works of releasing what it calls “Google Drive” next week to the public.
And Thursday, Facebook bought the popular photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion.
Google Drive
Google is not what it used to be 10 years ago when it was simply a search engine along with having its own online email service, Gmail.
To end wide speculation, The Next Web reported that Google will officially release Google Drive next week to Windows, Mac, Android and iOS users.
The new service will be another addition to the latest cloud service trend, in which users can upload and download documents to the cloud anywhere in the world.
Google will be competing against other popular cloud services such as Dropbox, which offers 2 GB of free storage to its users.
Google, however, will be offering 5 GB of free space for new users.
Just like Dropbox and other cloud services, there will also be an option to upgrade to more storage.
Users of the popular photo-sharing app Instagram received a little shock last week when social network giant Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion.
This is a deal that radiates in comparison to Yahoo’s $35 million purchase of Flickr in 2005.
Many users panicked and thought that it might be the end of the world’s most popular app.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the business move, however, will still leave Instagram the opportunity to grow independently.
This is a move that’s gotten mixed reactions because on one end of the spectrum, it allows Instagram to finally construct a business model. As we all know, Instagram is free.
And there’s also no advertising in the app.
As it grows, they’ll need some sort of revenue system to keep up with their growing infrastructure needs, which includes stronger servers to handle the immense traffic they get daily from millions of users posting thousands of photos per day.
The bad to come from this? It could threaten Instagram’s luxury of remaining free to users. This would greatly decrease the appeal of the app because people don’t want to pay for something that was once free.
Don’t be surprised if Facebook starts placing advertising in the app itself, which would ruin a great app.
Although very unlikely, there’s also a small chance they could starting charging users for the photo-sharing service.
More than likely though we will see some sort of premium service stem from this that allows the user to access premium content in Instagram.
Either way you look at it though, Facebook purchasing Instagram for $1 billion is a strong sign that the popular photo-sharing service will be around for a long time.
