Mark Zuckerberg has just updated his status to inform Facebook users that the social networking site will be buying popular photo-sharing site Instagram for a cool $1 billion.
Instagram was first launched in October 2010 for iPhone users and has just recently released a version for Android too. In fact, when released, the app was downloaded around 1 million times in the first 24 hours alone. For those that are not familiar with the app, it allows users to creatively apply digital filters from the choice of 17, and then upload images to their Instagram online account to share with other users, as well as other social networking sites such as Facebook.
The app has proved to be hugely successful since its release. It now has around 30 million users uploading on average 5 million new pictures every day.
According to reports, there are around 10 employees at Instagram. These developers will most likely join with Facebook employees and continue to improve the app and Instagram brand.
Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page:
“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. 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.”
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