This week there was a lot of press about Facebook buying Instagram for more than 1 Billion Dollars. Instagram is a photo sharing app for mobile phones – first iPhone and recently Android. It is a great app, has cool nostalgia filters, and makes sharing easy and fun.
Why is it worth so much? I’m not sure it’s worth $1B, but clearly a lot of Facebook is about posting photos. But I don’t think the revenue generated by Instagram is what attracted Zuckerberg to Instagram. More likely, Instagram was drawing users away from FB because people would follow their friends and family on Instagram just for the fun of looking at the pictures.
Or, it’s possible that Zuckerberg has a plan for some cool integration. You can already share to FB from the Instagram app, but how much more tightly integrated can it be?
A third possibility is that Zuckerberg can’t wait to start spending some of that IPO money he’s expecting to get next month.
