Zuckerberg Reveals Reasons For Instagram Purchase And Plans For Future

Instagram users afraid of what Facebook might do to bastardise their favourite service may have had their fears allayed by Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012. Facebook’s Founder and CEO spoke about a number of topics, particularly the social network’s stock performance and plans for how to make money through mobile platforms, but when it came to Instagram, he revealed the motives behind the purchase and what the future holds.

A lot of other Facebook acquisitions have seen the social network bring on a small team of acquired engineers, shut down the core purchased product, and then set the engineers to work on Facebook products. However, with Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg has said that they’ll treat the company like an Open Graph partner, which will likely mean that they’ll be much the same as a big third-party developer that has priority access to features.

So why did Facebook buy Instagram? Some say it was due to the fact that the photo sharing app was doing so well in an area that Facebook was not – mobile. But here’s what Mark Zuckerberg himself had to say about the whole deal:

“They started off building on top of our platform. They had just a great Open Graph integration that made it so you could take pictures and share them to Facebook. It was really first class…

But I also want to get to know the people who are building on top of our platform…

Then there was this question of how we could help them grow. But we had this question of how the value would accrue to us.

Eventually, I just brought up the idea to Kevin [Systrom, Instagram CEO]. ‘Hey, maybe we can just join and become one company.’ And that’s the game plan. We’re going to execute on features we decided on earlier.”

A lot has been made of this acquisition, with Instagram traditionalists voicing their fears that their beloved app would change beyond recognition, as well as raising concerns about how much information Facebook would be sharing about them. Many users even took to Twitter to state that they would be deleting their Instagram accounts. Hopefully Mark Zuckerberg’s chat at Disrupt San Francisco will put minds at ease, but if you still want to leave the photo sharing app behind, make sure you back up your Instagram photos with SocialSafe.