Facebook Buys Instagram For $1 Billion

Facebook has announced it is buying the extremely popular photography app-maker Instagram for a reported $1 billion.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the acquisition in a blog post today:

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.

Apple named Instagram its iPhone App of the Year for 2011. Instagram is also the 19th most downloaded free iPhone app of all-time. Instagram launched an Android app just last week.

Instagram is a free download on the App Store. [Direct Link]