Social consolidating: Facebook buys Instagram

It was just announced that the popular social photo network Instagram was bought by Facebook…

Wow! With that Facebook is doing yet another major buy in social Media land. I can’t say I’m happy with that. Yes I Facebook and yes I like it but what I like most about social media is that it allows me to pick my networks and contacts for each of the situations I operate in. My contacts on Twitter aren’t necessarily the same as on Instagram or on Facebook or on LinkedIn or on Google+ and neither is the content I share across those channels. I’d like to keep it like that. Different situations warrant different posts.

So when two of my favorite social networks merge….. Yeah, I don’t like it.

I think Facebook got that message too as Mark Zuckerberg announced in his post that it is their plan to keep it completely separate and keep all current options (like posting to Twitter) intact but for how long that is…we’ll see.

I just hope we don’t end up with a Social Media landscape that is completely dominated by just 2 or 3 major players  that control it all and I’m going to make it my goal to keep supporting those independent players out there. I don’t hate the big boys, I just think we need a lot of smaller players out there to keep the big boys in check.