Facebook to acquire Instagram for $1 billion

Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday that the social network has agreed to acquire Instagram, the popular photo-sharing mobile app.

Instagram launched for the iPhone in 2010. The app lets users upload or take photos and apply filters to get a similar look and feel of lo-fi photography. After photos are processed users can immediate be broadcast to other Instagram users, Twitter or Facebook via the app.
The popular app has already garnered 30 million iOS users and it was recently reported that 1 million Android users joined on the first day of launch. 

TechCrunch reports Facebook will pay $1 billion in cash and stock for Instagram. The photo-sharing app will remain a separate entity from Facebook, but will have "increasing ties to each other." 

"It's important to be clear that Instagram is not going away," Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom wrote on a blog post. "The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love.

Here is what Mark posted on his Facebook page.

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.