Facebook To Buy Instagram

Facebook announced Monday afternoon that it has agreed to buy Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices.

The social media company announced the move on its website, saying that the deal for the San Francisco-based company is worth roughly $1 billion in cash and Facebook stock. The deal is expected to close later this quarter.

"Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

The app debuted alongside Apple's iPod 4, and has some 30 million registered users. Facebook's acquisition of the company comes only days after the photo-sharing service began offering a version for Android phones.

Time with the instant analysis: "Photo sharing is big business for Facebook, and Instagram has the kind of mass appeal to make it a good fit for an acquisition by the social networking giant—perhaps Facebook is shoring up its featureset as it prepares for its long-awaited IPO."

Here's Zuckerberg's full post:

I'm excited to share the news that we've agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we've focused 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.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram's strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That's why we're committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. 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.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram's experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure.

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. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We're looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we're going to be able to build together.