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

It is about a week since Instagram, the mobile focussed – photo sharing service has announced their Android application launch, but it seems a much bigger deal was brewing behind the scenes. Today Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will acquire Instagram for a billion dollars, but he also went on to explain that Instagram will run as its own seperate company, and keep its mutliple social network roots.

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.

The Instagram acquisition is the biggest yet for Facebook, who has somehow until now only bought smaller start-up businesses. Even though the purchase amount is big, it is important to point out that Instagram is still a very young business at heart – only 551 days old today. Dennis Berman made a very interesting observation:

Makes you think…