NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is spending $1 billion to buy the photo-sharing company Instagram in the social network’s largest acquisition ever.
On the surface, that’s a huge sum for a tiny startup that has a handful of employees and no way to make money.
But the lack of a business model rarely dampens excitement about hot tech upshots these days. As Facebook has shown, itself without ads or revenue in its early days, money goes where the users are.
Instagram lets people share photos they snap with their mobile devices. The app has filters that can make photos look as if they’ve been taken in the 1970s or on Polaroid cameras. Its users take photos of everything from their breakfast egg sandwiches to sunsets to the smiling faces of their girlfriends.
In a little more than a year, Instagram attracted a loyal and loving user base of more than 30 million people. Apple picked it as the iPhone App of the Year in 2011.
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