No Filter

Sarah Frier is a Bloomberg News senior technology correspondent based in San Francisco. Her award-winning features and breaking news stories have established her as an authority on how Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter make business decisions that determine their future and our society. Frier writes frequently for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Television. She also wrote No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, which won the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched Instagram, a photo-sharing software with one simple but seductive feature: it made anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders built a community of photographers and crafters around the app, which quickly became popular. In less than two years, it captured Facebook's attention: Mark Zuckerberg purchased Instagram for a record-breaking $1 billion when it had only thirteen employees.

That could have been the end of a traditional success tale. However, the cofounders remained, attempting to preserve Instagram's beauty, brand, and cachet by treating their app as a separate company within the social networking giant. They advised their employees to make changes only when they were absolutely essential, rejecting Facebook's grow-at-all-costs mindset in favor of a strategy that emphasized innovation and celebrity. Just as Instagram was poised to hit a billion users, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously supported the founders' independence, began to feel threatened by Instagram's success.

Frier uses unprecedented access—from Instagram's founders, as well as employees, executives, and competitors; Anna Wintour of Vogue; Kris Jenner of the Kardashian-Jenner empire; and a slew of global influencers—to demonstrate how Instagram has fundamentally changed the way we show, eat, travel, and communicate, all while fighting to preserve the values that contributed to the company's success. No Filter examines how Instagram's dominance acts as a lens into our society today, highlighting our fraught relationship with technology, our desire for perfection, and the battle within tech for its most valuable commodity: our attention. The book is among the best books on content creation you should read.

Author: Sarah Frier

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1982126809/

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