Success Factors in Mobile Social Networking Application
Development: Case Study of Instagram
Rong Peng, Dong Sun
State Key Lab of Software Engineering
School of Computer, Wuhan University
Wuhan City, Hubei Province, 470032, China
{rongpeng, sundong}@whu.edu.cn
Wei-Tek Tsai
School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision
Systems Engineering, Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
wtsai@asu.edu
ABSTRACT
The distinguished features of mobile computing bring both
opportunities and challenges to the development of Mobile Social
Networking (MSN) applications. Learning the successful
experiences from existing MSN applications is valuable to both
industry and academy. The paper aims at identifying the success
factors of Instagram, a well-known MSN application. By
performing a historical case study, rapid development and reaction,
continuous focus on system scalability on demand, and creating a
good external environment are regarded as the three important
success factors. To achieve those success factors, 1) using existing
mature Open Source Software (OSS) extensively and consulting
resident experts at websites when necessary are the secrets to
develop and react to new requirements rapidly; 2) monitoring the
status of the system by tools and focusing on scalability in both
architecture design and detail optimization are vital to guarantee
the system scalable on demand; and 3) creating appropriate social
networks for different type of stakeholders using right popular
social media tools is important to create a good external
environment effectively. Based on these insights, the development
methodology of Instagram has been extracted, that can be used to
guide the MSN application development. At the end, the validation,
reliability and generalizability of the information gathered from
the case study are discussed thoroughly.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.0 [SOFTWARE ENGINEERING]: Design – Methodologies.
General Terms
Management, Design, Human Factors
Keywords
Mobile social networking application, historical case study, open
source software reuse, scalability, social network
1. INTRODUCTION
Social Networking Service has gained great success in the past ten
years. With the widespread use of mobile devices (e.g. smart
phones and tablets), features such as portability, real-time content
sharing, and utilizing location-based services, have brought many
new social experiences [1]. Traditional companies such as
Facebook and Myspace turn to support mobile devices. New MSN
applications such as Vine, Path, and Instagram become popular in
a short period of time. Moreover, MSN applications are profitable.
In the iOS App Store, the Social Networking category ranked third
in monthly revenues, behind Games and Productivity only,
according to the statistics data in January 2013[1].
Accompanied by enormous commercial opportunities, some
challenges must be thoroughly considered to develop a MSN
application successfully. As a continually evolving industry, new
MSN applications are launched every day, which intensifies the
competition. Thus, fast development and rapid reaction are also
crucial. Majority of mobile software applications are developed by
small or medium-sized teams [2], but successful MSN applications
need to have millions to billions of users. Thus, attracting and
serving a large crowd by a small group are also big challenges to
MSN application developers and providers. These increase the
complexity of MSN application development.
This paper aims at identifying the success factors from a
representative industry case study and offering insights for
software engineers in mobile industry. The insights also uncover
some interesting case study data for software engineering
researches and educators about current industrial software
development. It is organized as following: section II discusses the
related works; section III presents the case study methodology;
section IV elaborates the data and results gained from Instagram;
section V discusses the validation, reliability and generalizability;
and the last section concludes this paper.
2. RELATED WORKS
2.1 Challenges to MSN application
development
Interface and interaction design, privacy and security, and fierce
market competition have been identified as the major challenges
faced by MSN application development [3-5].
Firstly, good interface and interaction design can improve the
operability and minimize user interaction, which is important to
get user acceptance at first glance [3]. But how to accomplish the
task in such a limited screen size is challenging.
Secondly, sharing information with other users and matching users
with a shared information and time are the common features of
MSN applications. But how to guarantee the user’s privacy and
security when they access the information such as user’s location,
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