Facebook buying photo-share app Instagram for $1B

Insta­gram is demon­strated on an iPhone Mon­day in New York. Face­book is spend­ing $1 bil­lion to buy the photo-sharing com­pany Insta­gram in the social network’s largest acqui­si­tion ever. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Karly Domb Sadof)

BARBARA ORTUTAY

AP Tech­nol­ogy Writer

NEW YORK — Face­book is spend­ing $1 bil­lion to buy the photo-sharing com­pany Insta­gram in the social network’s largest acqui­si­tion ever.

Insta­gram lets peo­ple apply fil­ters to pho­tos they snap with their mobile devices and share them with friends and strangers. Some of the fil­ters make the pho­tos look as if they’ve been taken in the 1970s or on Polaroid cameras.

“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,” CEO Mark Zucker­berg wrote on his Face­book page. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”

Face­book said it plans to keep Insta­gram run­ning inde­pen­dently. That’s a depar­ture from its ten­dency to buy small star­tups and inte­grate the tech­nol­ogy — or shut them down alto­gether just so it can hire tal­ented engi­neers and developers.

“We think the fact that Insta­gram is con­nected to other ser­vices beyond Face­book is an impor­tant part of the expe­ri­ence,” Zucker­berg wrote. “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.”

Face­book is pay­ing cash and stock for San Francisco-based Insta­gram and hir­ing its roughly 10 employ­ees. The deal is expected to close by the end of June.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Face­book is expected to com­plete its ini­tial pub­lic offer­ing of stock next month. Get­ting Insta­gram is big win for Face­book as it works to har­ness people’s grow­ing obses­sion with their mobile devices and shar­ing every moment of their life.

Insta­gram was only avail­able Apple devices until recently. An app for Android devices was released last week.

Posted by AP News on Apr 9 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.