Facebook Acquires Instagram for $1 Billion

Facebook:

From Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg:

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…

Short Version: Facebook has paid handsomely for Instagram, and seemingly plans to let it continue as an independent product for the near future. Which is to say, you have a few months left to use it before the service is plastered with Facebook ads.

But the real question here isn’t, “How will Facebook ruin Instagram?”, but “WTF is Facebook doing?” If you’ll recall, Yahoo only dropped $35 million to pick up Flickr. Some people on Twitter are running calculations that indicate Facebook is paying over $30 per Instagram user which is just…like, what? Is this a defensive move, since Facebook is no longer the fastest-growing home for photos like it was back in 2004? Or do they really need those deep ties to the App Store? Then again, Facebook’s about to go public, so maybe they just felt like spending a mess of cash stock just because they can.