• Facebook Acquires Instagram for $1 Billion

    // Gradly // Acquisition, blog, Facebook, News, Photography, Social Networks 1 Response

    Facebook Acquires Instagram for $1 Billion

    Facebook Acquires Instagram for $1 Billion

    Mark Zuckerberg has just announced that the giant social network, Facebook, has acquired the popular photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion. Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom has also confirmed the deal. The 13 full-time employees who will each receive part of a $100 million will move to the social network as a result. Not to mention Instagram has 30 million active users and recently debuted a hot new Android app.

    Facebook’s official press release is here:

    I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

    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 believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

    That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

    We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. 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.

    These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. 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.

    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. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

    We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

  • Facebook Announces In-Browser Video Calling Powered By Skype

    // Gradly // blog, Facebook, News, Rants & Raves, Social Networks, Software No Responses

    After teasing an “awesome” announcement at the company for Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the chance to announce the launch of in-browser video calling powered by Skype.

    See The Friends You Message Most
    The new chat design includes a sidebar that lists the people you message most. Now it’s easier to find your friends and start a conversation. The sidebar adjusts with the size of your browser window, and it automatically appears when the window is wide enough.

    Create a Group Chat Instantly
    We’re also launching multi-person chat, which is one of our most requested features. Now when your friends can’t figure out what movie to see, you can just add them to a chat and decide together. To include more friends in your conversation, simply select Add Friends to Chat and just like your other chats, the history of your conversation is available in messages.

    Bring Your Conversations to Life
    Video chat has been around for years now, but it’s still not an everyday activity for most people. Sometimes it’s too difficult to set up, or the friends you want to talk to are on different services.

    So a few months ago, we started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook. We built it right into chat, so all your conversations start from the same place. To call your friend, just click the video call button at the top of your chat window.

    Hopefully Facebook plans to bring these new video calling features to its rumored iPad application. You can get video calling enabled by hitting the link below.

    Video calling will be available to everyone over the next few weeks, but if you don’t want to wait, you can get it now.