Facebook announced on their blog today that they are acquiring Instagram for approximately $1 billion.  Instagram currently has around 30 million users, although it’s likely that the majority of those users are also Facebook users.  The move is plainly an attempt by Facebook to maintain its dominance in the photo sharing space – their most significantly engaged service, with users uploading around 250 million photos per day and spending about 20% of their time browsing photos.

It seems that the majority of the Instagram team will be transitioning to Facebook, as per the same blog post mentioned above.  Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO is focused on evolving the photo sharing experience:
“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 will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.”