Last week, Facebook acquired Instagram, a popular iPhone and Android photo service app.
According to Jenna Wortham’s article, “Facebook Snaps Up Photo Service Instagram for $1B,” Facebook originally reached out to Instagram CEO, Kevin Systrom about acquiring the company in early 2011, but Systrom wished to keep Instagram an independent company. The deal reportedly cost Facebook one billion dollars. While some users fear that Facebook may soon shutdown the photo app, Mark Zuckerberg assures users that Instagram will remain in tact and as a separate photo service. With the acquisition, most of the app’s features will remain but “will be working on evolving the app to create a better mobile photos experience.”
Read an excerpt from the article.
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Instagram is a social network built around cellphone photos. It lets people add quirky filters and effects to their snapshots and share them with friends, who can “like” and comment on them. The service has been something of a rising star in the startup world. Barely two years old, it has attracted close to 30 million users, even though it worked only on iPhones until last week, when it released an Android version of its app.
“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote on his Facebook page. “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.”
Despite Instagram’s tremendous traction — more than 5 million photos are uploaded each day — the San Francisco-based company is still tiny. For much of its existence it has had fewer than seven employees, and it only recently topped 10. By way of comparison, Foursquare, another cellphone-focused social network, has nearly 100 employees serving 15 million users.
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