The Billion Dollar Photo

I guess a photo really is worth a thousand words or in Facebook's case a billion bucks.

 

Our favorite social networking giant recently purchased the hugely popular photo-sharing app, Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Instagram, the 2011 app of the year, will remain an independently branded standalone product but the acquisition will increase the ties to the program. The app will also gain major design and engineering resources. Not bad for a free program that produces no real revenue. Instagram does, however, have over 27 million iphone-based users and racked up more than 1 million users in its first 24 hours after being launched through Android. With that kind of popularity, it would have been no time before it would have register 50 million users and become a social networking site in its own right. With these numbers, Facebook knew it needed to act fast because as an article on TechCrunch puts it, "photo sharing and tagging are arguably what "made" Facebook".

I'm looking forward to seeing what's in store for Instagram and how Facebook will further integrate it on its site. Whatever does happen, it's pretty clear that Instagram isn't going anywhere and will continue to add artistic intrigue to even the most banal photos.