Brad Barket/GettyEv WilliamsRecently Twitter co-founder Ev Williams was quoted as saying that he "doesn't give a s---" if Instagram has more users than Twitter.
He has now taken to Medium to clarify that statement.
He argues that comparing Instagram and Twitter is like comparing apples and oranges.
Sure, they're both social networking platforms, but aside from that they are two fundamentally different services. Comparing the two based on a single arbitrary metric is useless.
"Is Instagram larger than Twitter? No - it's different than Twitter. One is largely private, the other largely public. One focuses on photos, the other on ideas. They're both very large, and they're both growing," he writes.
This concept is something he attempted to communicate in his original quote, but he believes got lost in the media frenzy.
"If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it's pretty significant," he said. "...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 sh-- if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures."
He says that the those who report on, invest in, and consume Internet services need to redefine how they determine success.
Evaluating different services based on one metric such as monthly unique visitors or monthly active users only tells one side of the story.
Read his full post here.