Facebook Buys Instagram

For one billion dollars, Instagram has joined the Facebook family.

Instagram, a San Francisco-based photo-sharing site, allows users to snap photos with their mobiles using any one of the 11 different filters and post them to Facebook or Twitter.

"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,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his wall.

“For years, we've focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family,” he continued in an official statement. “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.”

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“We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience,” said Zuckerberg. “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.”

This month, Instagram reported having more than 30 million accounts when it was just available on the iPhone (it originally debuted in October 2010.) Once the service was available to Android users, the app was downloaded more than one million times in the space of 12 hours.