This Instagram thing has legs.

In addition to its billion-dollar payday courtesy of Facebook, the photo-sharing service, in which users add filters to pictures so they look like they were plucked from your parents’ old photo albums, has surpassed 80 million users.

According to Venture Beat, users of the service have shared four billion photos.

Instagram is only two years old, and its rapid growth speaks to the fact that photos are the lingua franca of the Internet. It's also a well-run company—50 million users have been added since the site launched an Android version in April.

All of this so we can share pictures that look old.

The alternative, of course, is to wait 25 years. By then any photo you take today will look like it has been put through the Instagram ringer. Be warned, this route takes patience, something we seem to have in shorter supply during the Internet era.

[See: A complete guide for brands on Instagram]

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