Twitter's co-founder doesn't care about Instagram's announcement Thursday revealing that their social media platform surpassed the 300 million user mark, pushing them ahead of Twitter.
Evan WIlliams, one of Twitter's co-founders, spoke about Instagram's growth with Fortune:
"It's a question of breadth versus depth. Why is users the only thing we talk about? The crazy thing: Facebook has done an amazing job of establishing that as the metric for Wall Street. No one ever talks about, 'What is a [monthly active user]?' I believe it's the case that if you use Facebook Connect - if you use an app that you logged into with Facebook Connect - you're considered a Facebook user whether or not you ever launched the Facebook app or went to Facebook.com. So what does that mean? It's become so abstract to be meaningless. Something you did caused some data in their servers to be recorded for the month. So I think we're on the wrong path."
Since the news of Instagram's number of monthly users was released the photo-sharing site immediately began to get compared to social media rival Twitter.
Fourtune pointed out to Williams that Wall Street cares about other things than how many people use a platform.
He responded by saying, "Twitter makes a hell of a lot more money than Instagram, if that's what Wall Street cares about."
Williams added that looking at the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram is a more applicable way of comparing the two sites rather than putting more weight on the number of users.
"If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it's pretty significant," said Williams. "It's at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It's this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter-important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that's happening, I frankly don't give a s*** if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures."
