The popular photo sharing service Instagram has been acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed in a post on his Facebook timeline. The acquisition isn’t as much a surprise as the valuation, considering Instagram started from scratch and has just 13 employees in total, all of whom will be joining the Facebook team (in addition to becoming millionaires). The acquisition happened after a few days of Instragram releasing its android app and being valued at $500 million.
Zuckerberg also confirmed that Instagram will operate independently and that it will continue to support connectivity with services other than Facebook.
Instagram has 27 million users on iOS and grabbed 1 million users on android within 24 hours of launching on the platform. Both Google and Facebook has been trying to seal this deal for the last year and a half, but it looks like Instagram needed at least a billion reasons to get on board. In case you have not tried Instagram yet, you totally should.
