Over the Easter weekend Facebook bought popular mobile application Instagram (http://instagr.am/) for $1bn dollars.  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news on his public Facebook page you can read his statement here:

http://www.facebook.com/zuck

So what does this mean for the social media giant?

Facebook is content driven, and its success is dependent on users uploading and sharing content, approximately 250million photographs are uploaded daily to the site so it is no surprise that a mobile application that is image driven is going to come to the attention to Facebook.  The popularity of Instagram can be seen on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr where by users use Instagram as their choice of photo application to upload and share.  Indeed one could argue that that is why Instagram has gained so much popularity with users is because one can share with any number of social networks, quickly and effectively as well as creating beautifully bespoke images.

For a 2 year old start up company to be valued at $1bn dollars with 9 employees it is extremely interesting to see what Facebook is looking to achieve with the acquisition in the longer term.

In 2006, Google bought Youtube for $1.6bn dollars and ever since has looked to build the video search engine into its family (search, Google+, Gmail) and now sites alongside these other components on the Google tool bar.  The search component of Google is also fundamental to Youtube and whatever your views on the advertisements and promoting of particular videos, Youtube has done brilliantly well off the back of being purchased by Google. Google has effectively left Youtube to grow and develop without a lot of outside interference.

Instagram users have already started to show signs that some of the 30million users may leave the service in protest.

http://mashable.com/2012/04/09/instagram-api-hammered/

One can understand the purchase of Instagram by Facebook in terms of Facebook‘s interest in promoting photographs on its site and also the fact the fact that Instagram is a mobile only social network, and could be vital to the development of the mobile application of Facebook in the months and years to come.

Whether or not it is the people at Instagram who leave for Facebook, or whether as Mr Zuckerberg states Instagram will grow on its own terms, the social media giant has put a huge stamp on the mobile and social landscape and it will extremely interesting to see how both companies develop off the back of this announcement.