Outrageous claims and celebrities tend to go hand in hand, but when a famous person says something so crazy it can’t possibly be true, you can often guess the validity of the statement based on which celebrity is saying it. So when somebody that most fans love and respect says something that sounds incredible, you listen. So did Jamie Lee Curtis really invent Instagram? Not really, except, sort of.
The Halloween scream queen has said, on more than one occasion, that she invented Instagram, and she said it again in a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, which has brought the claim front and center once again. She did not go into detail on the show and so many are wondering just why she said such a thing. It sounds incredible, but as it turns out there’s a lot more validity to the claim than you might guess.
Buzzfeed did the leg work on this one and uncovered the existence of a Blogspot site started by Jamie Lee Curtis in the summer of 2010 called iPhoneys. Curtis has said previously that after getting her iPhone she started taking a lot of pictures, and figured a lot of other people were as well, so she set up the site as a place to post the images. The site is still up and and running so it can be verified when it was started, and it does pre-date the launch of Instagram, if only by a few months.
Curtis has apparently said that once Instagram launched, people stopped using her site, drawing another connection between the two, but that’s not entirely accurate. The last photos uploaded to the Blogspot site were in early 2012, which is a couple of years after Instagram launched. However, her site seemingly dying out does coincide with Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, which may have been the catalyst to get Jamie Lee’s friends to stop using her site and go to Instagram, which now the site all celebrities use.
While I’m guessing claims of inventing Instagram would not stand up in court (not that she’s ever claimed she would attempt such a thing), there’s no argument that Jamie Lee Curtis independently came up with the idea of a photo sharing website that launched prior to Instagram. I mean two different people independently invented calculus at the same time, so crazier things have happened. And it’s not like celebrities haven’t created incredible things that changed the world. Hedy Lamarr invented the technology behind wi-fi. If Jamie Lee Curtis were to get credit for inventing Instagram it wouldn’t even be that big a deal.
If she had tried to make this a bigger thing, and not simply a photo sharing site for her friends, who knows, it may have caught on more than Instagram? Who wouldn’t want to be on Jamie Lee Curtis’ photo-sharing website?