Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, announced with a post on his own social network he bought Instagram, a mobile photo-sharing application. The price is a billion dollars, partly in cash and partly in stock.

Instagram was launched in October 2010, initially only for the iPhone and only a few days ago as an Android application too. It had a million users in January 2011, it reached 15 million in December 2011 and now it has more than 30 million users.

In the past, both Google and Facebook already tried to buy Instagram but apparently the offer wasn’t adequate for a company that’s having a significant growth. In fact, the last evaluation it received was around $500 million so its owners will receive about twice that value.

In the hours following the acquisition, many people reacted with surprise because they weren’t even aware of the existence of Instagram. Among this application’s users, many immediately decided to abandon it because they don’t want their data to be collected and used by Facebook. So what’s the meaning of this enormous expense?

Instagram has two features that are really great in this period: it’s social and mobile. Today everything social is valued a lot and everything mobile is considered an excellent investment for the future because of the increase in the use of mobile devices.

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Someone already considered Instagram as a possible competitor to Facebook, even if it’s a photo sharing application and not a social network because in Web 2.0 Instagram’s features are important.

Around Instagram, various communities have formed so people only interested in sharing pictures could do that without even using Facebook. Let’s remember that the filter system allows users to create actual messages to share with friends and other people interested in photographs of the same kind.

For Facebook, this type of users is important and nowadays users are a real asset. Buying Instagram, Facebook will not only improve the integration between the application and the social network but also know its users preferences. This is a type of information that today is worth a lot to offer targeted advertising but also for companies who want to buy them. However, this is also the reason why so many Instagram users have already started looking for alternatives.

Facebook is approaching its IPO. The acquisition of Instagram also meant to reassure those who want to buy the social network’s shares about its future possibility to have a revenue. What could be a competitor, with the risk that it was purchased by Google, now is becoming part of Facebook’s family.

Despite all these reasons, a billion dollars are really a lot of money for the purchase of Instagram. It’s clearer and clearer that the speculative bubble that’s concerning Internet social services is continuing to grow. We’ll see how long it will last and who’ll survive its burst.