Instagram, the popular photo sharing and editing app which recently made its way to the Android platform quite successfully is now in news again. It has been acquired by Facebook. The acquisition is said to be worth $1 billion dollars. It’s Facebook’s biggest acquisition ever, in both price and reach. With around 30 million active users, Instagram has the largest audience of any startup Facebook has purchased.
Facebook founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg said in a blogpost, “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.”
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom insisted that “Instagram is not going away.” “We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network,” Systrom wrote. “We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience.” The app will remain in the App Store and on Google Play and users will still be able to share on social networks other than Facebook, Systrom continued. “Every day that passes, we see more experiences being shared through Instagram in ways that we never thought possible,” he continued. “It’s because of our dedicated and talented team that we’ve gotten this far, and with the support and cross-pollination of ideas and talent at a place like Facebook, we hope to create an even more exciting future for Instagram and Facebook alike.”
Instagram was long-awaited for Android and was released last week and it racked up more than 1 million downloads in just 12 hours. The launch also met a blacklash from iPhone users, who enjoyed having an exclusive hold on the stylish service.
Instagram is expected to continue operating as an independent company as hinted although we can expect certain aspects of the popular app to get deeper integration into Facebook.
