

Announcing Instagram Profiles on the Web - hornokplease
http://blog.instagram.com/post/35068144047/announcing-instagram-profiles-on-the-web

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state
The aesthetic similarity to Facebook is pretty striking. Now you really can
_see_ why Instagram was bought, and where it's headed.

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runemadsen
I wonder if they are going to flip the "facebook photos is now instagram"
switch some time soon?

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natesm
The Facebook Camera app still hasn't been updated for the iPhone 5. Too bad,
because it's an incredible app, much nicer than Instagram (which isn't
horrible or anything).

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obeattie
Facebook released an update just today that integrates the features from the
separate FB Camera app into the main FB app

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yllus
Alternate title: "Announcing the serious Facebook competitor that could have
been."

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barredo
It only competes with Facebook with one feature.

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duck
Yes, but you could argue it is the killer feature of Facebook.

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grinich
And hence, worth a 1% acquisition.

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nsns
There are already several 3rd parties on the web offering this service (e.g.,
web.stagram.com, statigr.am), wonder how they'll take this.

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iamben
Just posted the same thing on the other thread. Poor guys. I suspect this will
butcher their traffic.

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terhechte
That's the danger that you get when your main product lives of someone else's
main product. I'm the author of InstaDesk, an Instagram client for the Mac,
and I've also always assumed that this day would come. This will probably
affect me too, but not as hard as web.stagram and the like, since I'm offering
several "pro" features that will probably never make it to the Instagram
website. My next release will allow the users to use "comment reply"
templates, see which comments they've already replied to, download images for
specific tags, etc, and much more. All more suited to people who use Instagram
to connect to huge audiences (people with several thousand followers, etc). In
the worst case, I'll need to raise prices to account for a smaller niche
market. But let's see, it may also result in more Instagram users since it
will be easier now to "experience" the network.

I also hope they finally allow user registration on the web. Currently, users
can only register from within the iPhone or Android app, which makes it
difficult for people to just register in order to follow a couple of friends.

But yeah, since I've kinda expected this to happen at some point, I've been
busy in the past months to work on two separate products, that are slowly
nearing completion.

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iamben
Benedikt - I bought and loved Instadesk many months back (before I got the
Nexus 7, which is now my primary Instagram browser). I really hope this
doesn't hit you too hard and wish you the best for your other products :-)

That said, I really, really hope they don't allow people to post or register
from the web. Spam is bad enough already.

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terhechte
Thanks! InstaDesk still has many features that their current web
implementation doesn't have, so in the short term I expect the hit to be
marginal, but in the long term it's good that I have other products lined up
:)

You're right about the spam, but it always saddens me if somebody buys my app
and can't use it due to the lack of an IG account (I'm stating this
restriction right in the first sentence of the app description, but some
people don't even read that).

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kmfrk
You might take this as an opportunity to disable Instagram access to some of
the apps made redundant by this new feature:
<https://instagram.com/accounts/manage_access>.

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crugej
Very interesting. Begs the question to whether facebook plans to disrupt
itself with the Instagram acquisition somewhere down the line.

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davecyen
I'm surprised they didn't bake a deeper integration with Facebook profile and
photos instead of making Instagram more Facebook-like with potentially
competing features. As a user I do think this is the right approach to keep
both services running as separate networks, but in the long term I'm not sure
if operating as independent kingdoms will be sustainable if they continue to
merge closer in features. Facebook Camera now offers filters, Instagram now
has profiles in browser... Maybe its own news feed next? Not to mention
profile and news feed fatigue that could hurt engagement for both...

But that's all cynical speculation, congrats to FB and Instagram for not
killing off Instagram. My gut says that's the right decision.

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chris_p
It's interesting how the Instagram profile pages look kinda like facebook's.
The cover photo, the layout and the way everything is arranged.

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citricsquid

        Web profiles will launch to all Instagram users in the 
        next week or so. If you can’t see your profile yet, rest 
        assured that you’ll see it in the next few days.
    

Can anyone explain why this might be (the delayed roll out)?

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ErikHuisman
At Facebook they first release to a small percentage of users. They test and
fix bugs. If all is fine and dandy they increase it step by step until the
feature is live for everyone.

Tech talk on fb release strategies
[https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977...](https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977&oid=9445547199&comments)

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elorant
Next thing they'll add a bit sharing/voting and there goes Pinterest.

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ry0ohki
I think it's more of a final nail in the Flickr coffin. Pinterest is a
completely different vertical (it's not even pictures necessarily, it's lots
of random stuff on the web)

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elorant
Or it could be a wake up call for Flickr.

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karpathy
Flickr already had at least 10 wake up calls over the last 5 years. They're
not answering.

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vinayan3
I write a crawler for stats related to instagram profiles. This will make life
much easier because soon enough all the other web profiles for Instagram will
become less popular.

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8ig8
Wishfully, as I scrolled, I was hoping for: "To opt out of profiles..."

This may be great. I'd just rather take a wait-and-see approach.

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rbranson
"Who can see my web profile?

If your photos are set to public, anyone will be able to see your profile by
visiting instagram.com/[your username] on the web. You do not have to be an
Instagram user to view a public user’s profile on the web.

If your photos are set to private, your photos will be visible only to logged-
in Instagram users you’ve allowed to follow you."

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chucknelson
These look nice. I assume it's only a matter of time before these are
encapsulated in Facebook?

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nicktal
this is really...safe (and boring). there are a myriad of more interesting
ways mobile photos could be arranged and displayed. perhaps geo-tagged?
people? instead a grid. temporally arranged. that looks like my fb profile.
yawn.

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fosk
It's hard to say if you're not into it, but I wouldn't have sold.

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padraigm
I don't know, at the time almost everyone way saying they got way more than
they were worth. If this were a field with a lot of room for further
innovation, I'd tend to agree with you, but social photo sharing? Take the $1B
and move on to the next project.

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sohlis
They should probably find a way to make Emojis work

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denzil_correa
Did Facebook bring about this change? Interesting.

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cjstewart88
Why don't numbers have commas?

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uhwuggawuh
Because some places, like Europe, use the comma symbol as the decimal point,
so pi would be 3,14159...

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chris_p
That doesn't make sense. Everybody knows that the number of views a post has
is an integer, it doesn't really cause that much of a confusion for anyone.
Most europeans are used to it.

What they should do is display the right separating symbol depending on the
user's location.

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elliottkember
Why didn't they just buy <http://instagre.at>?

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malandrew
AFAICT it is because Facebook now has a "not invented here" culture. They only
products they have bought and kept in some form, they have bought for the
users (Beluga & Instagram). Every company they acquired that had a product,
but few users was a simple acquihire.

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benschwarz
I think this was really needed… you only need to look at the various sites
web.stagram.com, pictajam.com, instaprof.appspot.com, ink361.com and more to
know that people _really_ wanted this.

Great, however — there is no way to take your photos with you without using
the API (and thusly, oauth).

I was really hoping for an RSS/Atom feed, or a JSON endpoint that didn't
require auth.

Do you think this is an oversight on instagrams' part, or was I just misguided
in my hopes?

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rxooo
All I have to say is, About Fucking Time. How did they not have this feature
before?

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bravoyankee
Hmm. Very pinteresting.

