The company renowned for making headlines for all the wrong reasons these days, Facebook, has named Adam Mosseri the new head of Instagram. He succeeds founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who announced their departure earlier this month, amid rumours that ongoing clashes with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg were largely to blame for their decision to leave the company they started.

Before this promotion, Mosseri was vice president of product at Instagram. He was placed at Insta in May of this year after CEO Mark Zuckerberg restructured the Facebook executive team.

“We are thrilled to hand over the reins to a product leader with a strong design background and a focus on craft and simplicity — as well as a deep understanding of the importance of community,” Systrom and Krieger say in a post on the Instagram blog.

Mosseri seems a logical replacement, because he has been with Facebook for ten years and is close to Zuckerberg. Does that mean we could see closer integration between Facebook and Instagram? We wouldn’t be surprised at all. Mosseri’s appointment may give Zuckerberg more direct control over the image-sharing service, which could mean more changes users don’t want. But hey, Facebook owns it, and wants to make money off it, and that’s the big blue social network’s prerogative.

In their latest blog post, Systrom and Krieger says what’s most important to them is Instagram “keeping [the] community front and centre in all that they do”. Will that happen? We’ll have to wait and see.

Will changes to Instagram mean more woes for Facebook? Quite possibly. And it could do without more bad press. Last week it had to get 50 million users to log back into their accounts after a massive security breach, and, this week, reports surfaced that the company will likely start displaying ads to users of its WhatsApp messaging service soon. The coming months for the social networking giant are going to be nothing if not interesting.

Source: Instagram Blog