Be Excellent To Each Other

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.

What sort of track record do Facebook have with the stuff they've bought in the part?

What is it about Instagram that inspires such... fanboi-ish behaviour? First you have a significant subset whining that it moves to Android, now this.

Yet, many of the people whining are probably still playing Draw Something after it sold out to a truly evil company.

Folks are always scared of change...

I don't think K was talking about just instagram

Dance like nobody is watching.

Wank like nobody's home.

What was he talking about then? In this Instagram and Facebook thread? Just a general fridge magnet motto for life?

Dance like nobody is watching.

Pfffft. Wank like there's someone asleep In the same room.

Danger wank ftw.

It's all still a business, not a free service designed and built out of the love of people sharing their stupid shit with everyone else.

Standard internet sense of entitlement - nobody should expect to make any money ever if they want to retain the credibility of their whiny fans.

people sharing their stupid shit with everyone else.

The conclusion "That's nice for them, and good of them to let me use it all those years for free." seems to be the most fitting one.

Now I'm in a slightly better mood, I agree with this.

Sorry GY.

Why so much venom? Being able to connect with family and friends in an age where people don't stay in the same little community their whole lives, but move to new cities, counties and countries is a wonderful thing. To be able to do that so simply is wonderful. I saw the newborn pictures of my friend's baby after a really problematic pregnancy for the first time on Instagram.

To feel disappointed and to feel a sense of entitlement to it are very different things, though.

Yeah sure, and I'm sure both sets of people are highly represented by this news. Disappointment is fine as long as you acknowledge these things are the reality of the world. Getting in a flap because you always want everything for free remains pretty damn stupid.

Getting in a flap because you always want everything for free remains pretty damn stupid.

Don't misunderstand Mimi, I'm not venomous about it. If that works for you then great, but my personal experience of these sites is that people share stupid shit that I couldn't give much of a toss about. The function of seeing pictures I'm interested in is fulfilled through a variety of other services without having to subscribe to something that _just_ shows me pictures.

£2 a month.

Are Facebook really that bad? They seem practically saintly compared to the likes of Apple, Nike, Tesco, Google, etc.

#start-of-comments" class="postlink">Grainuad readers comments flip from amusing to a bit mental.

Some are exceedingly precious about photography.

I think many people use it as an uploading service to show pictures in Twitter. At least, that's how a lot of people I know use it.

But the question wasn't really about that. Just your language always makes you sound so angry, and I think being that angry all if the time must be kind of exhausting, but that's all off topic and doesn't matter anyway, so ignore it.

I'm not reading 162 comments. But seriously, what do you mean? In what way mental?

I wonder if there is a way to tell all instagram members to drop their accounts right now. That might send a message to silicon valley to refocus on things that matter. Would you folks kindly help to spread the word?

Then explain to me why, exactly, you want to bastardise a photograph taken with the current end-product of one hundred years worth of photographic technology to make it look like something from forty years ago for nothing more than aesthetic wankery. Perhaps when you're done with your list of overdone cliches, you can spare the time to explaining your rather quite frankly ridiculous and breathless defence of an awful photo app. Please, I'm all literally breathless with unspeakable anticipation.
....

I do so love someone who - inbetween feeling superior and worrying that their self-proclaimed superiority is failing them - resorts to lots and lots of italics. Why don't you ask the Guardian team very nicely if they'll write in some code to allow you to put sparkly effects on your words as well.

I suppose the reason I despise Instagram and all of it's little fans - such as yourself - stems from my love of The Dickhead Song. Which really sums up the whole stinking community of Instagrammites in one fell swoop - "we're having nu-age fun with a vintage feel!"

No one has actually explained just *why* they feel the need to fuck up a perfectly decent digital camera shot with a fucktarded Polaroid filter though.

Twitter already has such a service though, that was a bit of my point.

My language is blunt, but I'm not angry. As you say, being actively outraged at things would be very draining. I'm more benignly misanthropic and simply have no faith in the majority of the human race.