Instagram, Facebook, and the Social Media Web’s Continued VISUAL Evolution [COOL INFOGRAPHIC]

It’s kind of a jaw-dropping business story that Facebook just bought Instagram for $1 Billion. Here’s why they did it, in Mark Zuckerberg’s own words.

Then again, maybe it’s not such a big surprise… As I’ve mention in earlier blog posts—with all props to Twitter, which now links to photos inherently—social media is no longer a text medium. More and more, it’s about images and, yes, videos. (More on online video soon.)

Meanwhile, Google+ is getting people talking cuz many think that their newly updated “more beautiful” look is just Facebook timeline-esk. More to my point here, it’s definitely more visual, and a clear strength of Google+ has been and continues to be the way that it handles photo sharing, i.e. it’s more visual.

From the business side, I found Business Insider’s perspective on the Facebook acquisition cogent, albeit with a new kind of valuation model. There is actually a reason why Instagram is worth a cool billion to Facebook.

And what really got me going to write this post is that I just saw this cool InfoGraphic (shown below) that covers Instagram’s own timeline. I just had to share it with you here. I like the way they went all, well, visual to tell the Instagram story. (Thanks to the peeps at Visual.ly for making it embed-able.)

Oh yeah, here’s my Instagram (via ejpix, I’m “jleland”) in case you want to hook up there 😉