Breaking: Facebook to Acquire Instagram for $1 Billion

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Grand Master

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Breaking: Facebook to Acquire Instagram for $1 Billion

Facebook has just announced that it will acquire Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service for $1 billion in cash and shares.

The social networking site posted on the acquisition, its biggest yet, on its site, as well as on CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg?s Timeline on Facebook.

Facebook to Acquire Instagram

MENLO PARK, CALIF.?April 9, 2012?Facebook announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire Instagram, a fun, popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices.

The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted about the transaction on his Timeline:

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.

More to come, obvi.

Source: All Things D

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Grand Master

AJerman

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Ugh, one of the best mobile apps bought by a company that makes one of the very worst mobile apps. I can see the future of Instagram already. Open the app and wait half an hour for any photos to load, and half the time they probably wont at all. Looks like that was short lived fun. So much for Instagram.

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Noxa12

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Ugh, one of the best mobile apps bought by a company that makes one of the very worst mobile apps.

The android FB apps are absolutely appalling, they take forever todo anything, on my S1 writing on someone's wall is a task and a half as the page keeps on scrolling at every key touch, that's after you've waited 20minutes for the page to load.

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~Johnny

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Looks like that was short lived fun. So much for Instagram.

Why? They're still content on letting it run as its own separate business, and so presumably it'll still have the same people whos passion went into building the original applications to a certain level of quality. It's not like they're firing the whole team and replacing them with Facebook peons :p

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Grand Master

Chasethebase Reporter

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Why? They're still content on letting it run as its own separate business, and so presumably it'll still have the same people whos passion went into building the original applications to a certain level of quality will still be there. It's not like they're firing the whole team and replacing them with Facebook peons :p

Exactly this, basically what they've done (according to PR spiel) is hired the 6 developers of Instagram and acquired it as a company. This is like how Valve hired and acquired the Counter-Strike team way back when.

We'll see what happens.

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mps69

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Why? They're still content on letting it run as its own separate business, and so presumably it'll still have the same people whos passion went into building the original applications to a certain level of quality will still be there. It's not like they're firing the whole team and replacing them with Facebook peons :p

Knowing how MZ and the Facebook team like to tweak things I'm sure they have a few ideas up their sleeve already, which they will quickly ingratiate into the application.

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AJerman

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Why? They're still content on letting it run as its own separate business, and so presumably it'll still have the same people whos passion went into building the original applications to a certain level of quality will still be there. It's not like they're firing the whole team and replacing them with Facebook peons :p

We'll see. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem to me like the kind of person who would purchase a company and not stick his hands and opinions in the middle of everything. Facebook has been getting worse rapidly. If any of this spills over to Instagram it would kill it entirely. The only reason Facebook gets away with running like **** is because EVERYONE uses it. Of course they aren't going to acquire a company and tell you how they are going to change it immediately, but in a year, will Instagram still be where it is today? Or will it be integrated into the Facebook app as a camera tool? I like my Instagram being separate from Facebook, and I don't trust what a PR release from one of the most questionably trustworthy web businesses.

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Twisp

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The android FB apps are absolutely appalling, they take forever todo anything, on my S1 writing on someone's wall is a task and a half as the page keeps on scrolling at every key touch, that's after you've waited 20minutes for the page to load.

They work fine for me on my SGS. Fast and fluid.

Of course i've tweaked mine a bit so that could be why, heh.

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AJerman

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They work fine for me on my SGS. So it's probably your phone that isn't up to par.

If they work fine for you, you're the rarity. They don't work fine for ANYONE I know, Android and iPhone alike. News feed takes forever to load, photos take forever to load (if they do load at all), everything is slow as dirt, and does bounce around a lot like Z3LCIAH mentioned.

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Noxa12

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They work fine for me on my SGS. Fast and fluid.

Of course i've tweaked mine a bit so that could be why, heh.

Browsing FB isn't too bad, it's the actual writing on someone's wall that takes the biscuit.

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