Prepare to raise your pinky to the corner of your mouth and imitate Dr. Evil’s accent.

Facebook announced its largest acquisition to date on Monday: the popular picture-sharing social network Instagram. The selling price? A cool $1 billion.

Though this acquisition may be the most notable and controversial one to date, it is only the most recent in a long line of acquisitions trailing the ever-growing social media giant.

The company secured some acquisitions to merely secure a domain name, like the acquisition of FB.com from the American Farm Bureau Federation. But Facebook’s aim for most was to snag some of the most innovative and talented minds in technology and design. Regardless, each acquisition helped enhance Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, acknowledged that the buyouts were anything but altruistic.

‘We have not once bought a company for the company,’ he stated. ‘We buy companies to get excellent people.’

Looking at the long and colorful history of Facebook acquisitions, it’s interesting to see which buyouts corresponded to the creation and possible improvement of certain Facebook features.

The company bought Beluga, a group messaging service, in March 2011 for an undisclosed sum. The technological capabilities of Beluga later manifested in the equally lovable and loathsome Facebook Messenger service. The startup’s founders, Ben Davenport, Lucy Zhang and Jonathan Perlow, joined the Facebook team.

In December 2011, Facebook bought out Gowalla, the evil twin of geo-location social media platform Foursqaure. Officially shut down in March 2012, Gowalla lagged in demographic penetration in major metropolises and globally.

So why exactly did Facebook acquire this seemingly mediocre company? Gowalla’s beautifully intricate yet conceptually simple designs proved to be an asset to induce envy. Facebook’s main motivation was acquiring the talent that made the gorgeous app.

A statement issued by Facebook last December read: ‘While Facebook isn’t acquiring the Gowalla service or technology, we’re sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time.’

Though Timeline was already in existence when Facebook incorporated the management team behind Gowalla, it was reported in March by The Next Web blog that the team is helping with the integration and development of this new version of the Facebook profile.

This brings us up to Instagram. This photo-sharing social media application is hailed as homage to everything that is revered about traditional photographs. Aspiring photographers can snap pictures, apply funky filters and share them with followers on Twitter or Facebook.

But this acquisition seems different. Besides the astounding cost or monumental buying of Instagram’s active audience, measuring to about 30 million, there are no apparent plans to kill the Instagram service and reincorporate the services into Facebook in some sick reincarnation scheme. Zuckerberg claims nothing but pure intentions in the buyout.

Despite the promise of preservation, the Web is alive with concerns over the acquisition. One major problem is the extension of Facebook’s privacy issues into the realm of Instagram’s data stash.

Another is that the ‘mainstream’ popularity of Facebook will ruin all that was cool and appealing about the more exclusive social media network of Instagram. Tweets galore prompt Instagram users to export their Instagram photos to local storage devices using Instaport, followed up with a link to the Instagram page where a user can disable his account.

Such drastic measures won’t be necessary, but now that Instagram is tethered to Facebook with an umbilical cord that will be its sole source of fiscal resources and manpower, only time will tell if this app survives the acquisition. Until then, keep your eyes on the next startup to be bought out by Facebook, and photo-filters applied by Hipstamatic.

Jessica Smith is a senior information management and technology and television, radio and film dual major. Her column appears every Tuesday. She can be reached at jlsmit22@syr.edu.

Published on April 9, 2012 at 12:00 pm