Earlier this past week, comScore reported that Facebook-owned photo-sharing site Instagram had surpassed Twitter in terms of daily active users for their respective smartphone apps during the month of August. This news becomes even more impressive when comparing the respective user bases: Twitter has a user base of more than 500M users whereas Instagram has roughly 80M users (about 60% of Twitter users access the site through their mobile devices, whereas Instagram is a mobile only app). What makes this news fascinating is the age demographic of users for Twitter vs Instagram. Independent research sites suggest that only approximately 20% of Twitter’s user base is younger than 25 years, whereas for Instagram that number is greater than 50%.

This does seem to bode well for Instagram. As connectivity and storage become cheaper and as mobility becomes pervasive, rich data might become transcendent enough to make Instagram a preferred platform for communication. And in a few years, the current college going generation would join the workforce and develop into a user base that Instagram can monetize well. In that sense, an Instagram picture does seem like it might soon be proverbially worth a thousand tweets! If the world adopted text based social networks five years ago, and if the world is adopting rich media sharing networks such as Pinterest and Instagram today, could we make the projection that five years from now the rage would be a social and mobile Youtube? Who knows, but for now this news is for sure allowing Facebook to say cheese!