Eventually, I was going to have to address Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, my once-now-not-so-sure favorite social networking platform. We’ve written many supportive Instagram-related articles so it just seemed impossible to side-step the buyout news.

As we all know by now, Mark Zuckerberg purchased Instagram for a whopping 1 billion dollars. This is an amazingly huge price tag for a business that basically had no income despite a 40 million user base. Whether you think the purchase was worth it or not (I think it was since Instagram was already working on a 500 million IPO), the crazier news is that Instagram actually wanted 2 billion dineros.

2 billion dollars. For an app that allows you to take pictures and share them. A company with only 8 employees. No revenue stream whatsoever. 2 billion dollars. Wow.

According to WSJ, Mark had secretly been meeting with Instagram counterpart Kevin Systrom for about three days and the opening figure was 2 billion dollars. Zuckerberg was able to whittle that down in half. I think, in the end, both parties got what they wanted. I’m not sure Facebook’s board would have agreed, but Mark kept them in the dark before announcing his intentions of buying the photo-sharing app.

For the time I’ve used Instagram, I’ve loved it and have pretty much embraced it as the centerpiece of my business’s social marketing. I still reluctantly use the service, but can’t help myself from searching elsewhere (currently playing around with Path) since I’ve never been a fan of Facebook. I could go on a long rant about why I’m a Facebook hater, but I’ll save that for a later post. For now, I continue to use Instagram since the service hasn’t changed (yet) and I’ve established relationships worth keeping.