Amazon kills the Instagram competitor you never heard about

Techcrunch's Sarah Perez marks the end of another clone of a big network from one of the major technology companies. But not the one you think:

Hoping to capitalize on the social shopping trend and tap into the power of online influencers, Amazon in 2017 launched its own take on Instagram with a shoppable feed of stories and photos aimed at Prime members. The experiment known as Amazon Spark has now come to an end. However, the learnings from Spark and Amazon’s discovery tool Interesting Finds are being blended into a new social-inspired product, #FoundItOnAmazon.

Amazon had an Instagram competitor?

I'm both a long-term Amazon Prime customer and someone who is professionally interested in social networks, and I'd never heard of this. Or, if I had, I never had any reason to pay attention to it.

(Although I note that the inevitable "What brands needs to know about…" posts about it exist. These posts are never worth the electrons they are written on.)

So much of the battle in getting a network going in the first place is awareness.