Love Instagram? Well you will surely be counted with the 30 million plus global users that the mobile app has attracted so far and Facebook quickly took notice of the online social commotion and decided to join the fun.

Yet this time the giant social networking firm will take the lead as it snapped up the tiny San Francisco firm for a princely sum: a whopping $1 billion that reportedly doubled Instagram's current market value of $500 million.

Much of that worth was mostly attributed to the capital infusion recently made by venture capitalist Sequoia Capital, which entered the picture last week, according to The Associated Press, citing an unidentified source on its reports.

Tech and business analysts viewed the Facebook buy as all-win for Instagram owners and employees, the latter said to only comprise of a dozen staff being housed in a modest office.

The buyer owns a California campus and maintains satellite operations in key locations around the world.

But its latest move, experts said, only proved that Facebook is willing to acknowledge the superiority of other online services outside of its social networking kingdom and spend a big amount of money to make such services part of the Mark Zuckerberg global expansion.

Facebook, however, plans to keep the current operational set-up of Instagram, which means all the employees of the start-up firm will transition as full-pledged Facebook workers while at the same time preserve Instagram's present availability to other social networking realms.

You read it right. Facebook now owns Instagram, its formalisation set for June 2012 as reported by AP, but Zuckerberg had pledged that the popular app will not confined within Facebook's universe.

"We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience," the Facebook chief executive said on his Facebook page Monday.

The young multi-billionaire hinted too that such deal will be repeated in Facebook for a long spell, stressing that scooping up a firm that counts legions of aficionados would possibly never be replicated anew under his watch.

"This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users," Zuckerberg declared as reported by AP on Tuesday.

Instagram has successfully lured millions of users by its cool core offering, that is allowing the sharing of personal pictures with added tweaks that got almost everyone hooked.

Notable of Instagram's host of features is the photo filters that enable users to 'edit' their images and give them retro touches prior to online deployment.

The app, which only came out in early 2011, was such a huge hit and an excellent app at the same time that even Apple heaped praises on its developers, naming it recently as the iPhone App of the Year for last year, AP said.

The Instagram purchase, experts said, reflects Facebook's continuing finetuning of its presence in the ever growing mobile computing world, with the image-sharing app giving it another reason for sticking it out with the dominant social media company.

Besides, Facebook this time has become quite generous, with Zuckerberg himself stating that current Instagram users can opt not to integrate altogether the app with their Facebook accounts.

At any rate, it will be a marriage that is set to bring together millions and millions of users that both Facebook and Instagram count to date, further increasing their online and mobile popularity.