Instagram’s Site Now Has a Facebook-style Notifications Tab

In the process of changing its feeds to curated instead of chronological, Instagram today took yet another step towards becoming more like its parent company, Facebook: the website has been updated with a drop-down notifications tab.

The new Activity tab shows up as a blue speech button icon that has a heart in it, found in the upper right hand corner of the page. Click it, and you’ll see a box that contains recent social activity, from people who have liked and commented on your photos to people who have followed or tagged you.

Although Instagram started as a mobile-only photo sharing service, it has slowly developed its website into a solid interface through which users can interact with the service. Web profiles were launched in 2012. The following year, Instagram rolled out the Web-based photo feed, liking, and commenting. Things were redesigned with a minimal look last year, and Search was introduced as well.

The one thing the web interface still lacks is a way to upload photos and videos to the service — something other services like Flickr (which was Web-centric at first) offered from the beginning. The mobile shooting and posting experience has been core to Instagram up to this point, however, and there’s no indication yet that the company has any plans to diverge from that.