Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion

Users of both social media sites said Instagram was Facebook's biggest virtual visual threat, but no more.

Facebook just got more faces.

The social media giant announced Monday it is buying Instagram, a mobile app that allows users to quickly post and modify pictures they take with their phones.

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The small startup company sold for $1 billion, a move Maddie McGuire, a media socializer in LA, said makes sense.

“Some of my friends literally post Instagram photos a couple of times a day,” McGuire said.

And with social media, it is all about the sharing. In fact, we have become the most sharing of any generation.

We text. We tweet. We post. Now, thanks to innovations that we have come to take for granted, the minute they become apps, we can send anything we want to anyone we want anywhere we want in an instant.

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Our tweets are not just verbal but visual. Our Facebook pages are pictorial diaries and because we are now so adept doing all of our communicating through our phones, our photography skills are getting better – at least our eye for a good shot is improving. But on our Facebook page you get what you get.

Enter Instagram which turns us from picture taker to photographic artist. Don’t like that shot? Photoshop it into art. You can blur the foreground or colorize the photo to make it better than real life. It’s visual story telling.

Those who are both on Facebook and use Instagram said Facebook was slower to share photos and that Instagram was its biggest virtual visual threat, but no more.

One billion dollars later, the app is now an arm.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it’s a first for him and that it may be the last time he acquires a product and company with so many users.

Facebook plans to keep Instagram running independently instead of swallowing it up for its technology. Rather, the reach Instagram has among its fans will further expand Facebook’s reach.

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