It’s official: Instagram is now part of Facebook

Hipsters, it is my duty to inform you that we are now officially in the Instagram’s Facebook era. We’ve known that the massively popular social image sharing app was heading to Zuckerberg’s company since April, but now the deal has closed and Facebook has officially welcomed Instagram to the big blue team.

There has been a lot of speculation about what Facebook will do with the artistic image sharing app, and its users have raised concerns that it would simply become a part of Facebook’s existing photos offering. But in an official blog post, Facebook’s vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer said that the company remained “committed to building and growing Instagram independently” using its infrastructure and technical expertise.

Facebook started its acquisition of Instagram months ago, when it was scheduled to be bought for an estimated US$1-billion. Technically, the agreement (according to its filing with the Securities Exchange Commission) was for 22 999 412 shares of its common stock and US US$300 million in cash. In reality, since Facebook’s stock hasn’t been performing fantastically since its IPO, Instagram may have cost it far less. Shares were worth US$30 when the deal was made, but they’re currently sitting around the US$19 mark, which means Instagram could actually have been sold for as little as US$736-million (depending, of course, on the stock price at the time the deal went through).

Instagram also took to its official blog to make the announcement, and to say that over 5-billion photos have been shared on its Android and iOS apps since its launch in October 2010. Not bad for a startup with a staff of 13, hey?