A better question would be: what were the chances that Google could acquire instagram and use them to make a charge at facebook?

The question, of course, sounds a bit laughable. But the answer is a non-zero number big enough for facebook to pull the trigger and defend their territory(social networking & photos).

They can kill off a photo service that rivals their own. (I can't judge which one's better, because I use neither.)

Edit: I know Zuck says they will continue to build Instragram. I'm skeptical.

Now that they own it, there is no good reason to kill it. The only possible reaction to killing Instagram is ill-will with potential and current FB users, and bad press.

Not only would he be going against his word - while the internal metrics of the company are going strong - but he would be killing an asset and destroying shareholder value.

Even Zuck isn't crazy enough to pay $1B for a growing company and just kill it. That would be totally irrational.

I suspect this may very well be the best tech acquisition since Google bought YouTube.

Good luck for both of them - even though I am wary of FB's growing clout and I don't use Instagram, it's nice to see a good service find a good home that can support it over the long term.

I am SOOOO happy that Google bought YouTube. Can you imagine a world without YouTube?

I sure can't. Not a good world anyway.

I don't think they would outright and blatantly kill it. I think there are lots of scenarios in which Instagram becomes irrelevant due to neglect or intentionally crippling it. Ultimately, Zuck wants to keep people within Facebook's walled garden.

Google's acquisition of YouTube was different, because it was an opportunity for Google to serve more ads. I just don't see a similar opportunity for Facebook in the Instagram acquisition.

Most of Instagram's "technology for handing photos" uses S3, as described in previous Instagram tech blog posts. Instagram however has a massive big data structure which would lead to any big company getting high value out of them. Why use the tools they open sourced last week to improve your reliability if you can just acquire the entire team?

I'm pretty sure that Facebook has "handling a lot of photos" sorted:

http://gizmodo.com/5841667/facebook-photo-library-dwarfs-eve...

the thing is that they don't have it sorted. Trying to do any sort of photo management(move, delete, edit) in Facebook is a pain and I always receive database errors thrown back at me.

I'm not entirely convinced that Facebook can benefit from Instagram's infrastructure more than the Instagram can benefit from Facebook's.

Perhaps they just see Instagram as a threat? If everyone is sharing their photos on Instagram, they are not doing so on Facebook.

This is why I loved Instagram and Twitter, it wasn't Facebook... where people I don't even know anymore are all my best friends.

I wonder what sort of people putting photos on Instagram weren't also sending them to Facebook. Wouldn't it likely be people who don't/won't use Facebook anyway?

Friction is my big guess; Instagram is effectively a drop-in replacement for your smartphone camera, with some extra features that are incredibly popular right now (e.g., the overused look-ma-its-the-70s effect).

I've got two guesses:

First, it integrates an incredibly popular mobile destination into the Facebook ecosystem.

A lot of people have been using Instagram as a replacement for their built-in smartphone camera software. You don't even need to go on Facebook to post those photos, thanks to the Instagram Facebook app.

That's ad revenue and location data that Facebook would love to have more direct access to.

Second, Facebook hasn't really been focused on mobile until recently. Mobile features have been second to web features for a long time now.

I think that Facebook has woken up to how far behind they are in the mobile space, and wants to catch up quickly. Photos are probably the most important sector of the mobile space, especially now that phone cameras are generally as good as mid-market point-and-shoot cameras.

Hence acquihiring Mike Matas (Push Pop Press), and now Instagram.

Flickr is still big in numbers but has more or less gone south for a lot of users, and Instagram may have filled this gap.

there's a lot of people that wouldn't fit the bill for facebook friending but are perfect in a looser setting. In this perspective, even if userbase has overlap, I'd guess that the social graph on Instagram is radically different than the one on facebook for a lot of users.

Now depending on how much Instagram gets integrated into fb, that might become less and less the case and give an opening to another photo sharing service...

>Design and UI talent for mobile apps? Don't they already have Mike Matas?

I don't know who Mike Matas is, but given the quality of the Facebook for Android application and the amount of time Facebook's been spending on it... well... $1 billion is still a lot to buy a team to make your Android app not suck.

Though, on that note, the Instagram team wouldn't be the one to buy. Another startup that (took ages to) port their UI to Android and kept the crufty old iOS appearance.