They’re not strong enough on images generally. So when they see everyone getting really excited about Pinterest like everyone briefly did 6 months ago they feel vulnerable.

The best thing they have going for them at the moment is that everyone in the world is on Facebook. They don’t want everyone in the world signing up for something else that is all about sharing because of an inadequacy. Then people might start sharing something else on it too.

Oooo, Conspiracy theory. I like it.

Even if it wasn’t Facebook’s backup plan and their plan all along was to ‘hump’em and dump’em’. Use it so there was no ‘bad blood’ then pull out later if people start switching over. This will still piss a lot of people off but not the majority of who matters; Facebook’s users.

Like point 2, the acquisition shows that Facebook have deep pockets which has given them great online presence & this would have certainly help their IPO filing & share prices.

Instagram has nothing exclusive to it that other apps don’t show already except for a large community of users. Ironically these users are probably on Facebook already too.

So the recent launch of the Facebook Camera app, which was most probably in developement way before the Instagram buy out, is a competitor to Instagram’s app.

Now Facebook agreed to acquire Instagram in April for $1 billion but the acquisition is not yet finalised and still could fall through.

Is this Facebook’s backup plan? Was the acquisition of Instagram a marketing ploy?

I think, currently anyway, it’s all about interaction. At F8 each year all they go on about is the number of minutes each user spends using their services. The more time they take of any individual users time the more captive an audience they have. Monetising will be hard but is made easier by having more and more data on Facebook. Having photos in-house is key to this. Or rather stopping photos being stored outside of Facebook is not desirable to them.

Thanks Jamie. I think to warrant the valuation a combination of all 4 is needed. But that aside it was an ok move on Facebook’s part. It only takes another social network (as you say) to acquire and expand their feature set to become a real competitor for Facebook.

Facebook knows it sucks at mobile photo sharing (and mobile in general), and as you say, photo sharing is one of Facebook’s biggest competencies. But they are completely lacking in the way in which most people will share most photos in the future – mobile.

If Twitter bought Instagram, it wouldn’t have taken much more to make it the most popular mobile photo sharing ‘network’… and quite an entrenched one, too: so many millions use an Instagram app that can post to Twitter and Facebook, why delete it and switch to a Facebook-only one?

Nail on head re ‘value’ of those photos and the depth of user engagement in the network, too.