Instagram has just announced the reason it cut ties with Twitter: Its Web product has officially launched. “As of today, you can now browse your Instagram feed on the Web – just like you do on your mobile device. Go to Instagram.com and log in to your account to give it a try.”
The notoriously mobile-only platform has increasingly taken steps into the World Wide Web after launching Web Profiles last year and integrating with Facebook, giving Instagram images a wider Web reach. Still, up until now, the many missing features meant that Instagram was, at the very least, still a mobile-first company.
That changes today. Now, when you log in to your Instagram profile, you’ll be seeing a Web-version of what you see on your phone everyday: The feed is there in full, and you are able to navigate to user profiles, comment, and like to your heart’s desire. You can also edit your own profile, something that was made available with the introduction of Web Profiles. So what can’t you do? There still aren’t any discovery options available – you can’t see trending Instagram images or look through hashtagged photos.
It’s yet another very incremental step for Instagram when it comes to the Web. There are a variety of third party clients that offer discovery, basic analytics, and alerts, as well as different viewing options for browsing your own feed. Compared to these more robust applications, the Web viewer from Instagram is best described as a baby step.
Still, it’s a crucial one. After cutting off access to Twitter, meaning images aren’t able to be displayed on the microblogging platform, it was obvious Instagram needed to offer us a better mechanism for viewing this content from the desktop.
Thankfully, one thing remains the same: “We do not offer the ability to upload from the Web as Instagram is about producing photos on the go, in the real world, in realtime.”
“Instagram for the Web is focused on making the browsing experience a fast, simple, and enjoyable one.”
