Facebook Pwns Instagram

Ah, two of our favourite social media platforms, one who shrunk the world of networking to less than six degrees of separation and the other built upon a platform of sharing emotions and experiences via beautiful pictures – to become one.

Mark Zuckerberg, genius, founder, and CEO of Facebook, announced yesterday that the company is acquiring Instagram at approximately USD$1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook.

(Picture source: http://static.guim.co.uk)

Which is, suffice to say, a whole lot more than what Instragram is worth because it was just less than a month ago that Instagram was reportedly valued at USD$500 million. Plus, didn’t they just release the app for Android users as well?

Upon the announced, Mark Zuckerberg posted an official statement on his timeline:

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

Hmm.

Well, we all know that Facebook already has its own and somewhat unique photo-sharing capabilities. But has Facebook’s fear of the fastest growing Twitter-style photo-sharing app left our time’s greatest Internet entrepreneur with no other choice but to make the purchase call? Will the 27 million Instragram users take this piece of news lightly?

(Picture source: geeks.thedailywh.at)

One thing’s for sure, we’re waiting to see what a “web browsing Instragram experience” would look and feel like. Or what good this can/will do for the photo-sharing capabilities on the mobile Facebook apps.

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