Mashable Profiles Instagram, Touches on Dogpatch Community

As part of their Scaling Startups series, Mashable profiled Dogpatch-alum Instagram: "Scaling Instagram: How the Photo Sharing Startup Avoided Catastrophe in Its First Days". It is an interesting read considering Instagram's instant, tremendous success... and it is also a testament to Kevin and Mike, who are terrific. The article also touches upon the core of Dogpatch Labs: a community of entrepreneurs of different backgrounds and skills. As the Instagram team quickly (ie six hours after launch), co-founder Mike Krieger leverage the Dogpatch community's input / experience:

Instagram, already fast-approaching 40,000 users, would need something much sooner to meet the weekend demand. “We needed to be on a platform where we could adjust in minutes, not days,” says Krieger.

So, Krieger, a former UX designer at Meebo with admittedly no experience scaling a startup, walked around the Dogpatch Labs coworking space in San Francisco — the locale of Instagram’s first office — and queried other startup founders about what to do. Officemates suggested that Instagram move its service to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Instagram officially went from a local server-run operation to an EC2 hosted shop in the wee hours of Saturday morning October 9, 2010. Doing so was much like open heart surgery, according to Krieger.

Also fun: Mashable highlighted the Instagram picture of the Red Bull consumed during their all-nighter at Dogpatch

Thinking About Facebook's Expanded Like Button

Today Facebook rolled out a rather significant change: the Like button has replaced the Share button's functionality. It's an important transition because, at least for me, it has already changed my "liking" behavior. Auto-publishing a story to my wall makes me think differently about the simple action of liking... which I do several times a day. With this new functionality, that would result in several feed posts and consequently annoy my friends / dilute the importance of my other posts. Below is an example of the feed post that resulted from liking a Mashable article. It auto-selects the image and summary.

In other news though, this post had over 5,000 Facebook Likes (way more than other articles)... so perhaps it does drive traffic:

Twitter Launches Tweet Button; Publishers to Allocate Pixel Real Estate

Twitter has officially launched their Tweet Button - a natural move which will place them beside Facebook's like buttons... and across millions of pages on the web (soon to be on this blog!). The question is what happens to everything else? There is only so much space on each page and ultimately publishers will only devote real estate to those buttons that deliver the most traffic / engagement. Twitter and Facebook will clearly qualify - but who else? My favorite example is this post from Mashable which leaked the Tweet Button a couple days ago. The Tweet Button screenshot sits below the Facebook Like graph and beside Tweetmeme, Digg, and Facebook Share. Of course there are others: For instance, I use Apture and Disqus. And more will come - like Facebook's long rumored social bar.