Facebook Just Bought Instagram For 1 Billion Dollars

Facebook Just Bought Instagram For 1 Billion Dollars

Facebook just purchased Instagram for 1 billion dollars. Who would have ever thought that an app that simply takes an image, makes that image square, puts a retro filter on the image, and then posts the image to a blog could be worth $1,000,000,000.00. To all of the Instagram users out there; are you excited or terrified about this merger?

Mark Zuckerburg writes on his wall:

"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.

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.

We're looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we're going to be able to build together."

via Gizmodo

Lee Morris's picture

Lee Morris is a professional photographer based in Charleston SC, and is the co-owner of Fstoppers.com

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19 Comments

O M GAWD... I simply don't get it....

Oh well, RIP Instagram. They'll end up ruining it.

I hope they keep it pretty much the same. And not try to turn it into a mini facebook...

I think they will integrate FB and Instagram. Users on Facebook will have the option to edit their images using their Instagram account and directly upload.

Great now FB can police my photos even more not that I use my phone pix for anything but behind the scenes stuff anyways but now ill have to have to make sure my behind the scenes stuff is rated G cause lord knows FB is cool with duck face but a navel is blaspheme  

I think one of the reasons Instagram was so popular was because it WASN'T Facebook.

Ho hum.

exactly

For some reason I can't help but imagine Dr. Evil's voice exclaim "One Billion Dollars!!"

Incredible how much money FB makes to be able to make $1bilion investment just like that... 

I had to double check the date, as, you know, it's a little late for April 1st.

But I hate instagram, so in a way I don't care that it has been bought by FB. On the other hand, I do care if it means everyone on FB is going to have sh*tty instagram-esque photos now.

See ya Instagram, will die for sure...

First it goes Android, the sells it's soul to Facebook. Goodbye, Instagram.

So someone here please remind me how this "make your photos look retro" app suddenly became worth a billion dollars? When Instagram eventually dies and becomes a relic of the past, I'll be laughing with a Nokia PureView in my hand, taking pictures that I edit with a real editing tool (like GIMP or Photoshop).

I think they will put a freakin timeline on instagram.. 

Facebook will ruin instagram. FAIL!!!!

dont you mean instagram will ruin facebook?

I have to say though that I find it quite depressing* that this "news"  gets 16 comments(now 17) and yet the work of Jeremy Cowart (posted below this trivial bullshit) shooting images of the children of Haiti can only muster two voices willing to give any encouragement to the Author.

*walks away vomitting

 In one word: x-factor!

Why do I keep reading this with my little finger in the corner of my mouth as 'one beeelion dollars'?