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"Instagram didn't start out as Instagram. It started out as \u2026 Burbn.\nKevin Systrom, the creativity researcher Keith Sawyer explains, was a fan of Kentucky whiskeys. So when he created a location-based iPhone app \u2014 one driven by the success of networking app Foursquare \u2014 he named it after the booze. The app was complicated, but it took Systrom just a few months to build: Burbn let users check in at particular locations, make plans for future check-ins, earn points for hanging out with friends and post pictures of the meet-ups.\nBurbn was not, however, terribly successful. The app was too complicated, Sawyer points out, and had \"a\u00A0jumble of features that made it confusing.\" Systrom, however, kept tweaking the app. He paid attention to how people were using it. He brought on another programmer, Mike Krieger; the pair\u00A0used analytics to determine how, exactly, their customers were using Burbn. Their finding? People weren't using Burbn's check-in features at all. What they were using, though, were the app's photo-sharing features. \"They were posting and sharing photos like crazy,\" Sawyer notes.\nAt that point, Systrom and Krieger decided to double down on their data: They focused on their\u00A0photo-sharing infrastructure and scrapped almost everything else. Burbn would become a simple photo-sharing app.\nAs Sawyer puts it in his book Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Creativity:\nThey began by studying all of the popular photography apps, and they quickly homed in on two main competitors. Hipstamatic was cool and had great filters, but it was hard to share your photos. Facebook was the king of social networking, but its iPhone app didn\u2019t have a great photo-sharing feature. Mike and Kevin saw an opportunity to slip in between Hipstamatic and Facebook, by developing an easy-to-use app that made social photo-sharing simple. They chopped everything out of Burbn except the photo, comment and like features.\nThey also added filters. But simplicity remained their focus. In their final version, you could post a photo in three clicks.\nAfter months of experimentation and prototyping \u2014 on October 12, 2010 \u2014 Systrom and Krieger released a simple photo-sharing app. It was named not Burbn, but Instagram.\n\"It's about going through false starts,\" Systrom said at a conference in 2012. And, yep, \"Burbn was a false start. The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. YouTube\u00A0was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.\"\nAnd so does, often, your name. Systrom and Krieger scrapped Burbn to make way for the Instagram many would know today. \u00A0One of their early versions was called Scotch (Kevin liked scotch whisky too) but it was slow and filled with bugs, and you couldn't use filters on your pictures."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/07/02/instagram-was-burbn-first/>