Facebook has announced that they will be acquiring photo-sharing service Instagram for the not-too-shabby sum of $1 billion.
The announcement came via a post on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline, which stated that he was “excited” that Instagram’s employees would be joining the Facebook team.
“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.”
Zuckerberg emphasised that Facebook wants to grow Instagram independently, retaining the current features that the service provides 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.”
He went on to say that Facebook would be looking at integrating features taken from Instagram into their own products, while developing the service using Facebook’s engineering team.
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said in a blog post related to the announcement, “The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love. You’ll still have all the same people you follow and that follow you. You’ll still be able to share to other social networks. And you’ll still have all the other features that make the app so fun and unique.”
Source: Facebook and AllThingsD