Facebook is to pay $1bn to buy Instagram, a fast-growing online photo site, in its largest acquisition to date.
The purchase, for cash and stock, extends the social networking site’s reach in online photos, an area it already dominates through its own pictures service, while also marking a new departure in terms of the types of acquisition it has pursued.
Set up just two years ago, Instagram has grown rapidly to become one of the most popular applications running on Apple’s iOS operating system. It is known for the filters and effects that users can apply to pictures before sending them on to their networks over services such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.