Facebook has just acquired the best mobile photo sharing app Instagram for the exorbitant amount of $1 billion in cash and stock. Instagram will remain an independently branded standalone app that’s separate from Facebook. It does not only have the solution that Facebook was looking for, but also a built-in community of photographers and photo lovers.
With a community of 27 million users in iOS, and the launch of the App for Android, Instagram was aiming to get 50 million users. This was clearly a threat to Facebook due to the lack of activities registered in their own “all-in-one” mobile apps. For that reason, Facebook had to move fast – really fast and aggressive.
Over the last 2 years, both Google and Facebook had approached Instagram but there was no deal in the end. With this is mind, Mark Zuckerberg knew that it had to pay a really good price in order to keep Instagram away from Google. So it was, but the price was a bit of an exaggeration for a company that has no revenue at all.
Joining forces with Facebook not only will help economically to Instagram but also will get a huge boost in design and engineering resources. The most important part is that even though Facebook owns the company, it will stay separate in both culture and product brand like Google has done with keeping YouTube and Android as separate brands. To enforce this, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said:
It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away.
Mark Zuckerberg posted the following letter to his Timeline about the purchase:
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.
There are two things about this acquisitions that are indisputable truth:
- We will never know how actual photos once looked like. Seriously
- A camera phone + a few cool filters + twitter = $1 Billion. I do not know how Mark got those numbers
But not everything is perfect and pink color paradise. After the announcement, many users tweeted aboiut their intentions to delete their Instagrams accounts.
Same here. WHY ZUCK WHYYYYYYY “@Pecora_: @xeni I'm pissed, Instagram is my favorite app. Actually I use it even more than twitter.”
April 9, 2012 7:42 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite
@xeniXeni JardinRT delete urs ! @CBaezzz Delete ur instagram!! The Feds own it now!!
April 9, 2012 8:03 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite
@Toniiiiii_Anto You can delete your instagram account here, but remember that all your photos will be gone, and you won’t be able to re-register under the same username in the future (so be sure if you want to delete you account before using this site).
Some users are worried about the modifications that Facebook will do to the service, but as stated before this will not happen. Other users are worried about privacy issues claiming that Facebook is set on collecting all your personal into one big database. Peter Rojas form gdgt posted:
Most people disagree, but I think it's impt to not use services that you have issues with, even if they are free.
April 9, 2012 7:36 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@peterrojasPeter RojasThis users that quit and those whose intentions are to quit the service, saw Instagram and many others small social networks as a escape from giants like Facebook and Google+ but now that it is gone so they are. We will see them migrating to a similar or newer service.
