Facebook pays $1b to acquire Instagram photo sharing app

By Stephen Fenech On Apr 10, 2012

Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app launched in October 2010, has been bought out by Facebook for a reported $1b. It is Facebook’s largest ever acquisition.

The app allows users to snap images on their smartphones and apply various effects filters before sharing them with their followers as well as on other social networks including Twitter and Facebook.

Based in San Francisco, Instagram has only 13 employees and released its app for Apple’s iPhone before adding the Android version only last week.

There are more than 30 million Instagram users on the iPhone with more than a million Android users downloading the app in the first 12 hours it was available for the platform.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he was excited to share the news of the Instagram purchase on his blog today.

“For years we’ve focussed on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests,” Zuckerberg wrote on his blog.

Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in October 2010 and took just eight weeks to build and launch after 12 months of planning.

Users can download the app for free and create their own online community of friends to share their photographs with.