$1 Billion.

Thats what Facebook deems Instagr.am is worth. The 19 month old startup with 13 employees was acquired  by Facebook in April 2012 for the sum of 1 Billion dollars.  But Why did Facebook do that?  The internet was in an uproar with participants firmly on both sides of the debate.

Incidentally, that is also  the number of photos  it is estimated that has been uploaded onto instagram as of April 2012.

It has often been said that Content is  what the internet is about. In the first act that is the  drama of the internet age, it was all about the content found in text. Google’s algorithms were optimized to search for, identify, catalog and rank text based content.

We are early into the second (Social) act and with the increase in the bandwidth of internet connections, the visual generation suddenly has the means to share their existence through the sharing of images.

Facebook is all about sharing  images. It is the worlds largest image sharing site. However, if the truth be told, Facebook is the elder statesman of the social age. It was a platform conceived and developed in an internet age where sharing was primarily done via the typewritten word on a device with a keyboard.

However, in this day and age, Sharing is increasingly social.

Social is becoming synonymous with real-time sharing.

Most of the sharing therefore, is being done via a mobile device.

Facebook, while great on the platform it was conceived for, has never really been able to break into the mobile sphere.

Instagram was conceived, designed and implemented as a Mobile Native platform.

Social by design now includes being ‘mobile enabled’ by design and through the acquisition of Instagram Facebook has entered the new sphere with a bang.