Social networking giant, Facebook, has acquired mobile photo sharing service, Instagram, for $1 billion in a cash and shares deal. This would be one of Facebook's most major acquisitions since the service has a large number of registered and active users. However, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has said that the company will build and grow Instagram, independently, and that it will be "mindful about keeping and building on Instagram's strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook," despite the two being complimentary to each other. Ability to cross post to remain: He has also assured that the ability to cross post photos to other social networks will be retained. He added that, Facebook will try to help Instagram to grow further by leveraging Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure, while it will learn from Instagram's experience to integrate similar features into its own products. Zuckerberg also clarified that Facebook does not intend to acquire more companies, if any, with a user base, this large. 30m users on iOS app: Instagram allows users to take photos, apply different effects through filters and share them with other Instagram users, in addition to cross post to Facebook and Twitter. Instagram users can follow other users, and comment or like photos. Within two years of starting as an iPhone only app+service, the service has managed to gain a considerably large user base. According to Instagram, the service has more than 30 million registered users, who upload more than 5 million photos ever…
