Facebook Acquires Instagram

As Facebook’s IPO looms, Mark Zuckerberg announced today (via Facebook naturally) that they are acquiring Instagram:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

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….

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.

No idea what this portends — a greater focus on photographs (Pinterest anyone)?  Mobile? — but either way they won’t have this kind of freedom after they have gone public. I mean $1 billion, goodness.

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion back in 2006.

2 Replies to “Facebook Acquires Instagram”

  1. Instagram is a free iOS app (and now an Android app) for photography. You take a picture, apply a filter (sepia, old polaroid, what have you) and upload/share it with your friends. Most people who love it do so because of the mobile interface. Presumably it is for the mobile bits that Facebook spent so much. Their mobile photo sharing ability is anemic.

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