Weekly Wrap-up: Let's Hear It for Instagram

Each week we wrap up our top ten stories, and this week half of our most read stories were those that dissected and discussed the billion dollar purchase of Instagram by Facebook. Learn more about this story and many more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Facebook’s Real Mobile Question, Post-Instagram: Can It Challenge Apple and Google?

Clearly the Instagram purchase was huge news this week, dominating our Top Ten. We dissected the story in detail, looking at how the purchase affected current Instagram users, what it meant for potential Facebook investors and even what we could learn about Facebook’s mobile monetization strategy. The sizable purchase makes a great deal of sense, and inspired us to ruminate on both the value of Path and the strategy of Pinterest, and what other companies might be on a Facebook shopping list. I don’t think anyone would argue though that it’s the normal exit for a mobile app like this, despite Instagram’s amazing growth story. Instagram won the lottery this week.

Top Posts:

15 Clever Responses to Facebook Buying Instagram

By now you’ve heard the news. Earlier today Facebook announced it had acquired Instagram for a meaty sum of $1 billion. We’ve written about who the sale is really about (it’s the investors) and how to get some more followers. But what does the Twitterverse say about this? Here are a few insightful tweets about this whole shabang. Read on. More

8 Things Instagram Did Right

With its billion-dollar sale to Facebook, Instagram instantly became the latest poster child for startup success. In just 551 days, the photo-sharing mobile app zoomed from zero to 30 million-odd users, and 10 million U.S. visits by March 2012, up 1000% since December 2011. Its valuation outstrips that of the 116-year-old New York Times.. More

[Infographic] How the App Stores “Really” Stack Up

If you liken app stores to race horses, Apple is the biggest, baddest thoroughbred in town. Google Play is a fine specimen with some distinct qualities but has a lot of work to do in the practice yard before catching up. Everything else is an also-ran. Windows Phone has been growing rapidly, increasing from 40,000 apps in Nov. 2011 to 70,000 at the most recent count. Then there is BlackBerry App World. For all of Research In Motion’s troubles, its app repository is tied with Windows Phone at 70,000, which includes 15,000 specifically designed for the BlackBerry PlayBook. There are no tablet apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace, mostly because there is no Windows tablet (well, one worth anything). More

Jack Tramiel Remembered: The Legacy of the Commodore Founder and PC Pioneer

Quite a few people have been retroactively credited with the invention of the personal computer. One man who never claimed credit himself, but who would certainly be listed among Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Clive Sinclair, Adam Osborne, and John Roach as original creators of the personal computer industry is Jack Tramiel – who passed away today at the age of 83. More

SAP Plans to Dominate Enterprise Mobile Apps with HTML5 and New Partnerships

One of the largest software companies in the world just made a series of moves that could make it one of the most powerful enterprise mobile developers in the world. Hidden within SAP’s Hana database platform announcement yesterday was the fact that the company signed three strategic partnerships with leading U.S. mobile development firms, signaling what could be a huge shift in the balance of power in the race for enterprise mobile dollars. More

To Pivot Or Not To Pivot: Instagram vs. Pinterest

One of the more intriguing aspects of Instagram’s $1 billion payday from Facebook is that photo sharing was Plan B. Compare that to the other social startup darling of 2012, Pinterest, which has stayed true to its original mission from Day 1. More

How to Create Your Own Social Media Playbook

If you are trying to plan out your enterprise’s social media activities, it helps to have a playbook. Several companies have produced such a document, ranging from a few pages to more extensive tomes, and I wanted to give you some tips to preparing your own, as well as talk about best practices. More

New Analytics Dashboard for Infochimps.com

This morning the Big Data online marketplace vendor Infochimps announces a new analytics dashboard for their services called Dashpot.

Dashpot lets users configure their dashboard with exactly the information they need. For example, users can visualize their data in the form of line graphs, heat maps, geographic maps, counters, pie charts, or lists. You can also customize with selects, filters and sorts, to let users setup drilldowns for zooming in and out on their data, too.This lets users of different types and skill levels create multiple views depending on who is interacting with a given dashboard, and also specify what information each view should show. More

5 Things the Experts Say You Need to Know About the Facebook-Instagram Merger

Depending on which hastily pasted-together analysis you believe, Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition Monday is reason enough to close your Instagram account, and Facebook is going to ruin Instagram. We’re not buying it, so instead we spent Monday interviewing a dozen experts for their thoughts and opinions on the deal. More

Life After Death of the Check-In

The first generation of location-based apps has fallen short. Most consumers don’t even know location apps exist, and only a tiny minority actually use them. Today’s apps focus on benefits for businesses, like being discovered by nearby shoppers, but they’ve failed to stir customers. Can next-generation companies like Geoloqi show us why location is valuable? More

ReadWriteWeb Channels

Enterprise

Follow ReadWriteEnterprise on Twitter.

Mobile

Follow ReadWriteMobile on Twitter.

Cloud

Follow ReadWriteCloud on Twitter and join the ReadWriteCloud LinkedIn Group.

Hack

Follow ReadWriteHack on Twitter.

Start

ReadWriteWeb Community

You can find ReadWriteWeb in many places on the web, a few of which are below.