[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Facebook has reached an agreement to acquire Instagram, a popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices for approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg (Founder and CEO, Facebook):  We’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

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.

We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

Instagram was launched in October 2010 by co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Instagram lets users snap a photo, then choose a filter to transform the look and feel. Pictures are shared on Instagram, and can be uploaded to other social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

The app has 30 million registered users on iOS, and over a billion photos uploaded.