Happy birthday Instagram. The social media app is 10 years old.

On Oct 6 2010, a new photo-sharing application was officially released through Apple’s App Store.

On the first day 25,000 people signed up, and after six weeks there were 1 million users. Instagram currently has around one billion active users a month, and 500 million people are on the app every day.

It had immediate success. The app was bought by Facebook two years after its launch, and by that time it had become the world's most popular platform for uploading endless streams of selfies and had its own stars, Instagirls such as fashion blogger Chiara Ferragni with 21 million followers and Kylie Jenner of the Kardashian clan with 196 million followers.

For a brief history of this sprawling phenomenon, we have to focus on the big picture — the broad trends that define its first decade. There's the story of Instagram largely replacing the blogging platforms that were so popular through the noughties. There's the story of young people innovating on the platform, and creating a new kind of online personality: influencer.

"Influencers at that time, who were called bloggers, who were already making money off their blogs, simply transferred that commerce onto Instagram." Dr.Abidin Said.

Digital influencers like Privez publish their “experiences” and in return are paid, in addition to the free trips. Privez, who has 140,000 subscribers, makes between six and seven “sponsored trips” per year, “not counting the two-day press trips”, she said.

The app has become the preferred platform for luxury brands, particularly fast-fashion labels, which have developed powerful digital marketing strategies to attract millions of users on the platform. A shopping function introduced last year has turned Instagram into an e-commerce site, allowing companies to use their profiles as virtual storefronts so users can shop and pay without ever leaving the app.

“We have entered the era of ‘the internet reality’ where one can only exist through what one publishes on social networks. I selfie, therefore I am,” said Michael Stora, psychologist and president of the French research collective Observatory of Digital Worlds in Humanities (OMNSH).

Instagram today is celebrating its 10th birthday with the launch of several new features, including a private “Stories Map,” offering a retrospective of the Stories you’ve shared over the last three years, a pair of well-being updates, and the previously announced IGTV Shopping update.

Remember bloggers? In 2010, bloggers were big. There was something called the 'blogosphere'. Within a few years, this hoard of long-form narrative posts had been supplanted by Instagram, which had the advantage of being a central platform. Influencer product-selfies replaced the long written review.

In 2013, the phrase “do it for the ’gram” – doing stuff so that you can post evidence of yourself doing it on Instagram – was added to the Urban Dictionary.

Instagram surprised everyone in May 2016 when it changed its distinctive camera-logo, to a brighter more colourful logo inspired by its community of users. It divided opinion at the time, with some users hating the new design and others loving it.

These days, Instagram is always looking in the mirror, even when it seems to be having fun. Cartoonish filters launched to fend off the threat of Snapchat, hugely popular among younger users, can give you funny cat ears and snuffly baby-animal noses, but they can also give you big almond eyes and a heart-shaped face with wide cheekbones.

Instagram Stories, with more than half a billion daily users, was shamelessly borrowed from Snapchat in 2016. It allowed users to post 10-second content bites which disappear after 24 hours.

In 2019, an egg became the most liked photo on Instagram , at the time reaching almost 55 million likes!

World_record_egg is now a smug-faced verified account, with 5.9 million followers of its own.

The popular egg took over the previous world-record held by Kylie Jenner whose announcement of the birth of her daughter Stormi reached 18 million likes.

Instagram is largely responsible for the rapid professionalisation of the influencer industry. Insiders estimated the influencer industry would grow to US$9.7 billion in 2020, though COVID-19 has since taken a toll on this as with other sectors.