As if Facebook didn’t monopolize enough of everyone’s time, now it would seem that the site is on a mission to monopolize the social media dimension as well.
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s acquisition of the photo editing and sharing app, Instagram, on Monday, April 12.
“I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook,” said Zuckerberg in a post on his Facebook timeline.
This was no cheap purchase for Facebook. The combination of cash and stock added up to around $1 billion paid to obtain Instagram.
“Instagram rocketed to 30 million iOS users in 18 months and was named iPhone app of the year in 2011.”said Bruce Upbin of Forbes.com.
Instagram has an even more promising future. This month, the app became available to Android users as well. One million Android users added the app on just the first day.
Though the two companies are clear frontrunners in the social media world, many students are perplexed by their combination.
“I mean I love Instagram and I love Facebook,” said sophomore marketing and supply chain major Alie Rothman. “I just don’t understand what exactly they’re going to do together.”
According to Zuckerberg, the plan is to learn from Instagram’s experience and build similar features into Facebook products. At the same time, Facebook will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.
“Ideally what Facebook will do is leave Instagram’s simple user interface alone-meaning, no advertisements or redesign. Instead, the social network should port the features like filters and sharing over Facebook mobile upload,” said Chenda Ngak of CBS News’ Tech Talk.
So, for Instagram lovers who use the application and its sharing network, there is no need to worry that the app is going anywhere soon.