Facestagram has landed

facestagram

Instagram has officially become part of Facebook today. Instagram passed the 5 billion photos mark and Facebook had to pay $1 billion to get a hold of this rising photo service. Both companies claim that Instagram will keep a decent part of their independence. The deal was announced in April but it took them 5 months to finish it because of certain regulations they had to fulfill. ”The Instagram app and its features will stay the same one you know and love, and we’ll keep working together to build a better Instagram for everyone.” came the comment today from Instagram, their team will move to the Facebook offices and work from there.

Now that the deal is closed, we will most likely have an option to log into our Instagram via Facebook account. Hopefully it will speed up and simplify adding photos to Facebook accounts; also it would be nice if a multiple photos upload feature was introduced. So far you can only share one picture at the time from Instagram to Facebook. At the moment, on pictures you share on FB from Instagram you can only tag friends in posts, but not directly in the photo, this could be also one of features that will arrive soon. If we consider rumors about Facebook's smartphone, this could be a decent add on to it, and also experience in this field from the Instagram team will come in handy.

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook VP of Engineering said “As we said from the beginning, we are committed to building and growing Instagram independently”. However Facebook likes to meddle in everything and it probably won’t take long before they try to get their hands into Instagram's work. The Instagram team is full of young enthusiastic people and after you start a project like Instagram. You might want to start another one if the first becomes a great success. Facebook may also want to use Instagram for marketing, and to put photo ads into their feed. How much of those earnings could go to Instagram no one knows but I have a feeling we will find out soon.

[Ed – what concerns us is that this is the same language that Facebook used when they bought up face.com. They were very specific about keeping it open and running under its own name. Not long after the deal was completed they not only closed down the company but also blocked developers from using the API. We hope that this does not happen, but Facebook’s history is against them here. We would not be surprised to see Instagram go away and Facebook’s own photo app absorb it and the Instagram name disappear…]

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