Your Instagram Feed Is Now Available On The Web
A few weeks after launching web profiles, Facebook affiliate Instagram has made the following feed available to users on the web.Instagram insist that they remain a mobile-focused company, which is no surprise considering Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s stance on the future of social media: he described Facebook as “a mobile company” late last month, with Facebook mobile representing 23% of the 41% growth in advertising revenue in Q4 last year.
In the announcement post on the Instagram blog, co-founder Kevin Systrom highlights the importance of Instagram remaining mobile-minded, saying, “our focus on building out a mobile-only experience is a unique path that we’ve chosen for many reasons, the most important of which is that Instagram, at its core, is about seeing and taking photos on-the-go.”
However, Systrom then acknowledges that, “to make Instagram even more accessible to our growing community”, there needs to be a web service to accompany the mobile one.
With this in mind, Instagram first released a profile page for users on desktop devices which greatly resembled a Facebook profile page, with a profile picture set on the left-hand side of the page, a follow button taking pride of place beneath and a cover photo collage comprised of some of the users favourite images dominating the top.
Now, Instagram has introduced a following feed onto the internet for desktop devices. The web feed is very similar to the one on mobile devices: users scroll down through photos in a single column, with the most recent at the top, then going down in reverse chronological order.
To the top left-hand corner of the photo is the profile picture and name of the poster, while beneath is the like button (although users can double-click photos to like them) and a comments box, as well as details of those who have liked and previous comments.
There is a lot of unused white space either side of the feed, however, which detracts from the sites aesthetics. To combat this, Systrom suggested that you “shrink your browser down to a single column for your feed to look more like your mobile feed.”
Systrom explains the reasoning behind a web feed further, while also pointing out why a certain feature available on the mobile is unavailable on desktop, namely the ability to upload photos:
We believe that you should be able to access Instagram on a variety of different devices, any of which may be convenient to you at a given moment – including your desktop computer or tablet. 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. On the other hand, Instagram for the web is focused on making the browsing experience a fast, simple and enjoyable one.It is relatively unlikely, then, that Instagram will ever allow users to upload photos from desktop, but the following feed could be improved to make use of the white space bordering the photos.
What do you think of Instagram’s new web service?
Contact us on Twitter or leave your comments below.
Will Sigsworth
Follow us @SocialMediaF & @WillAtSMF
www.socialmediafrontiers.com
Your Instagram Feed Is Now Available On The Web
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