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Instagram gave Facebook their goodies for cheap.

While the ultra-popular pic sharing social media giant was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for a cool $1 billion, SMS and MMS text message application WhatsApp was just purchased by The Book for an insane $19 billion.

Reports CNN:

In a play to dominate messaging on phones and the Web, Facebook has acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion.

That’s a stunning sum for the five-year old company. But WhatsApp has been able to hold its weight against messaging heavyweights like Twitter (TWTR), Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Microsoft’s (MSFT, Fortune 500) Skype.

Referring to WhatsApp’s soaring growth, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call, “No one in the history of the world has done anything like that.”

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app for smartphones, according to OnDevice Research.

Buying WhatsApp will only bolster Facebook’s already strong position in the crowded messaging world. Messenger, Facebook’s a standalone messaging app for mobile devices, is second only to WhatsApp in its share of the smartphone market.

It’s estimated that WhatsApp has 450 million users but that isn’t the most astonishing fact of the story. Co-founder Brian Aston once applied for jobs at both Twitter and Facebook in 2009, only to be turned around for whatever reason. Obviously there was never any love lost for Zuckerberg’s company but Aston hasn’t tweeted since 2012.

Remember ladies and gentlemen, if you can’t beat ’em, build your own thing and then beat ’em. Check out Aston’s tweets in the gallery to see why.

Photo: Twitter, Brian Aston

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