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Facebook moves on Instagram
by Aheli ·
Facebook, the leader in social media with over 750 million users, has made its first major acquisition. In a 1 billion dollar move Facebook bought Instagram, a photo sharing mobile app company boasting over 25 million iPhone users and 5 million downloads within its first week of being on the android market.
The sale is expected to close later this quarter and will mark the first, and possibly last, acquisition of this size made by Facebook according to Mark Zuckerberg, the man at the helm of the Facebook titanic. The move was announced on 9 April on Zuckerberg’s own “timeline” via Facebook. Facebook’s founder and CEO claims the acquisition is about improving the user experience for both Facebook and Instagram and not about integrating the two services.
“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.”
Zuckerberg goes on to state his commitment to improving and building on the winning formula Instagram, giving them full use of his own engineering team as well as making use of theirs. What he describes is a very symbiotic relationship where the two remain separate entities but work very closely to their mutual benefit. Facebook will remain Facebook while improving on their photo sharing abilities, and Instagram will maintain as they have with their Facebook “opt out” option and well as their options to share with other social media.
