Facebook buys Instagram

Facebook has acquired photo-sharing start-up Instagram, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a posting on the site Monday.

Instagram allows users to take pictures and add effects or small edits on the fly before uploading the picture to a site where it is visible to a user's friends. The Instagram application updates so-called social photography sites like Yahoo's Flickr or Google's Picasa by focusing on camera-equipped smartphones — first Apple's iPhone and recently phones running Google's Android system.

Zuckerberg said he is "committed to building and growing Instagram independently," allowing its user base of millions to exist outside of the Facebook walled garden. He promised users that not only will Instagram remain able to post to other social networks — an unsurprising move given Facebook's long-standing practice of allowing competing products like Twitter to post to users' accounts — but Facebook will keep it possible for Instagram users to keep their photos from their Facebook friends' eyes. Users will also be able to follow users on multiple networks , he said.

Instagram's acquisition doesn't mean Facebook will give up on its own photo-sharing solution, Zuckerberg said, adding that Facebook "will try to learn from Instagram's experience to build similar features into our other products."

Zuckerberg called the Instagram acquisition "an important milestone" that marks Facebook's first purchase of an established company with a massive and loyal user base — a departure from the company's practice of buying out potential rivals before they developed much of a reputation beyond early adopters and programmers. But industry observers shouldn't hold their breath for a round of Facebook buyouts.

"We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at all," Zuckerberg said.

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