The final hurdles have been cleared, and Instagram is now officially part of Facebook. The startup’s 16 employees will be relocating from San Francisco to Facebook HQ in Menlo Park. In an announcement released through its newsroom, Facebook reaffirmed its commitment to keeping Instagram running as a standalone service:

As we said from the beginning, we are committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Instagram will continue to serve its community, and we will help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure. We also can’t wait to work with the talented Instagram team to improve the mobile experience.

There will certainly be more resources available at Instagram founder Kevin Systrom’s disposal: the photo sharing app is being taken in by a company with roughly 4,000 employees and legions of world class software developers.
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