Facebook has now become the medium to post some official statements or press releases by some huge names in the industry and Mark Zukerberg, CEO of Facebook just did the same. Earlier today, he announced that the company is planning to acquire the most widely used photo-filtering and sharing application for the iOS and Android, Instagram for $1 billion in cash and also shares on Facebook. The application launched about two years before and has become one of the most widely used photo-sharing application for the iPhone. Later, the company leaped into the Android devices by releasing a dedicated Android app last week and it saw over a million downloads in just a few hours.
Looking at its potential, Facebook has acquired the entire company, including the 13 members of the Instagram team, into Facebook. And now, what would happen to the development of Instagram? Zukerberg says that it will stay in development and will be done independently and would work the same way it does now. The announcement was also made on the Instagram Blog by ist CEO, Kevin Systrom, who said, “you’ll still be able to share to other social networks.” And noticeably, this is the first time Facebook is acquiring a photo sharing service, with so many active users (30 million to be precise).
Here’s the official announcement from Zukerberg on 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.
Source:Instagram Blog, Facebook