14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook's acquisition of Instagram was much talked about. The price in particular was a head-turner, over $1 billion, €760 million in cash and stock, considering Facebook's valuation at the time. It has gone down since then since Facebook stock price is pretty low these days.
Still, it was a spectacular move and, despite the price, Zuckerberg was lauded for snapping up Instagram, one of the hottest mobile apps ever created.
In fact, despite several rumors, it was surprising to find that there were no other interested buyers.
At least that's what founder and CEO Kevin Systrom claims, but it turns out that Twitter did make a serious and official offer for Instagram.
The price was half what Facebook was willing to pay, but anonymous sources from Twitter said it was willing to pay more. But Instagram rejected Twitter saying it wants to go at it alone.
A few weeks later though, the Facebook deal was announced. Twitter was never notified. Now, obviously, this isn't much of a big deal in on itself, but it could be a big deal since Systrom sworn that there were no other offers.
Instagram ended up being bought for $735 million, €558 million. It may have gotten more from Twitter or Google or other companies interested.
Instead, Instagram opted to stay with Facebook. This could open it to some criticism and even a lawsuit from investors. No company involved has made any comments on the matter.
Instagram has been growing fast even after Facebook acquired it. It also remained rather independent, though there are moves to better integrate the two services.
There is also a big move towards the web, Instagram has had a minimal web presence until a few months ago when photo pages and later web profile pages were introduced. More recently, Instagram cut off Twitter from its API, luring users to its own site to view the photos.