Instagram Launches Web Profiles, Looks Much More Like a Social Network
This morning Instagram made a huge splash in the social networking scene by launching its own web profiles for viewing users’ photographs through a web browser. Each profile shares a user’s photographs, profile info, and pretty much everything the mobile view has. The service just became a lot more Facebook-like.
In addition to viewing a user’s photos and info, you can also do things such as follow, comment, and like directly through the web interface now.
Profile are located at instagram.com/USERNAME, which is similar to Twitter’s URL convention and much simpler than Facebook’s. It makes finding any user’s profile a breeze, since you know the URL simply by knowing their username.
If you can’t see your own profile yet, just hold tight: the company is planning to roll out the new feature over the course of this week. To see what profiles look like, here are three accounts that have the feature enabled: @cucinadigitale, @palomaparrot, and @mycookingdiary.
If your account is set to “private”, your page will still be accessible, but your photographs will only be viewable by logged-in users who you’ve allowed to follow you.
In terms of photos, Instagram’s web interface is still read-only. Uploading images to the service can still only be done through the iOS and Android mobile apps.
Having a web-based interface should make it much easier for Instagram to monetize its massive user base. On the other hand, it might also open the door to a new flood of spam and abuse, which are already growing problems on the service.
(via Instagram)
