Facebook buys Instagram for 1 billion dollars
Facebook snapped up the hugely popular photo-sharing appInstagram Monday, for roughly $1 billion in a combination of cash and stock.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the acquisition in a post on his Facebook Timeline Monday.
The sale is expected to close later this quarter, and will bring the 8-person staff of Instagram to the social network.
“For years, we’ve
focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your
friends and family,” Zuckerberg said in the post. “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.”
Zuckerberg went
on to say that the company will be building on Instagram’s strengths and
features and growing the app independently rather than “just trying to
integrate everything into Facebook.”
Facebook plans on
keeping features within the app that allow photos to be published on
other social networks, and the ability to have followers and follow
people who are not necessarily your Facebook friends.
“We will try to
learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our
other products,” Zuckerberg said. “At the same time, we will try to help
Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team
and infrastructure.”
Instagram launched its iOS app in October 2010, and came to Android for the first time last week.
This is the first
time Facebook has acquired a company or product with so many users. “We
don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.” Zuckerberg
said. “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.”
What do you think
this means for the photo-sharing app — and how will it boost the social
network? Let us know your thoughts in the comments
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