As was predicted, Facebook’s $1 Billion takeover of Instragram has caused quite the furore, in both the media and the loyal users of the mobile photo-sharing app.

There are of course, two sides to the argument, that this is either an inspired move by Mark Zuckerberg and his all powerful social network or that this spells the end of Instagram as we know it.

Surely further integration of our social media tools can only be a good thing? Well, at the Practice we’re not convinced.

Certainly, many of those will point to the fact that we will only need one place, one login name and one password through which we exhibit our everyday thoughts and share our lives with friends and family. Whilst indeed this condensing and streamlining may be the way of technological hardware and gizmos, we don’t believe that this is the case with social media.

There is a reason that some people have drifted towards twitter and others the way of Facebook when expressing themselves. With regards to Instagram, there is a certain elegance and beauty about uploading weird and wonderful pictures and sharing them with complete strangers in complete anonymity. Instagram has removed the invasive side of social media, a feature that may be lost in this corporate buyout. Of course, many people, in fact the vast majority that have Instagram will also have a Facebook account. But it is precisely the fact that Instagram was kept separate from our Facebook accounts that made it appealing. Now, we will probably have no choice but to converge the two, much to our discomfort. There are just certain people who we don’t want following our every move.

We’re sure the Facebook founders mean well for their users in this venture, but you can’t help feel that there is a slightly more sinister side to this. Unlike banks, which are routinely blocked from merging so as to prevent them creating a monopoly on the market and becoming, forgive the phrase “too big to fail”, Social networks face no such obstacle. It is important to remember that this purchase follows a long list of Internet buyouts, such as Google’s purchase of Youtube or Yahoo’s acquisition of Flixster. If this continues, we run the risk of condensing the market and losing many of the niche social media networks that seem to care about their users over their revenue.