Announcing Instagram Profiles on the Web | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Instagram Profiles on the Web

blog.instagram.com

114 pointshornokplease64 comments

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

My initial thought was "Wow, they really ripped off Facebook. How can they get away with this?"

Then I remembered...

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

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).

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

The aesthetics are similar to Facebook probably because they're sharing the exact same design team.

Wrong. The designer of web profiles (Maykel Loomans) joined Instagram before the acquisition and this has been in the works for many months.

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

It only competes with Facebook with one feature.

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

And hence, worth a 1% acquisition.

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.

They'll go away. I wouldn't be surprised to see a TOS change soon to ensure that.

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

It's an incredibly obvious direction for Instagram to expand in so I'd hope they had some plan for this

Rake in as much cash as possible from their ads whilst Instagram aren't doing it and then wind it down?

I can't see what other benefit they'd bring over the official site (except as another post noted, RSS feeds).

Exactly - it's like the Twitter developer relationship, where you just have to assume that they're going to coopt your business at any time if all you're doing is repurposing their API.

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.

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.

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).

I saw Kevin Systrom speak at Pando Monthly and he was asked this question in the QA, how they were doing to deal with developers and whether they'd be like Twitter (to which everybody laughed, but the question asker didn't expand).

Systrom said that they very much wanted people to do things that they themselves don't plan to do. He gave the example of a company printing photos to t-shirts. He left it mostly unstated but it was strongly implied that where their product goals are the same as what people are developing with their API, they'll have no reservations competing with people - or even forcing them to stop doing things.

So ya - if you want to be an Instagram developer it would seem the correct strategic path would be to do things they aren't doing and will probably never be interested in doing.

Kudos to Facebook for not falling victim to the innovators dilemma, and allowing Instagram to develop into a service that could very well end up killing what we know as Facebook today.

Thanks for the info. It is good to know that they're not considering turning off the API or limiting it. There's very little information on the official channels about this.

From the horses mouth, 1:38:30 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgn2fhZBAVA&feature=fvsr

Definitely didn't say anything about not having an API going forward.

This is only a single user's profile and stream of photos. Those websites offer web-based Instagram clients, which includes things like your incoming photo stream and the popular lists. Until they replicate those features on the web as well, then they'll still need to exist.

In the case of my app, monogr.am, we provide a custom designed gallery with options to choose any images from your feed. We have custom domains etc. I don't see this as a competitor at all for our market - people who really put time and effort into their images.

Instagram's really just showing your latest photos online and a few curated ones at the top. The user has no control at all over which images are shown.

Not so long ago IIRC Twitter closed the gates before orthogonal consumers (i.e. they were not competitors either).

I wouldn't be surprised much if Instagram/Facebook used similar tactics.

Considering yours is a paid service, I would hope you're already thinking of something else, because im sure the FB TOS will block you and besides, if someone wants a customizable free version then they just use tumblr with one of the millions of these (or make one by hand)

If your product service offered a channel from instagram to tumblr and it didn't violate the TOS for FB then your product might have a future, but likely only as a free offering.

We're planning to support a variety of services, not put all our eggs in one basket.

Tumblr, webstagram and all these sites do not offer the same service as us. Maybe our marketing needs work. We're paid because we allow you to CHOOSE ANY of your Instagram photos to make a portfolio from through caching a user's feed and using the realtime API to keep it up to date. All the other services simply wrap the API and show your photo stream - Now Instagram offers that too so these services offer nothing more.

But how hard is it to post photos to a custom theme'd tumblr for free? Being able to select which photos from the instagram feed end up on a tumblr page isn't a feature worth $5/month. It's trivial to share photos to both instagram and tumblr

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.

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

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.

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

    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)?

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...

To fix bugs, to test performance and avoid an massive traffic hit to their servers

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

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)

Or it could be a wake up call for Flickr.

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

I really doubt a service that crops your images to squares at a low maximum resolution is going to compete with Flickr.

Maybe I'm just set in my ways, but I still love flickr. It's how I store my photos online. I certainly don't want to store my photos on Instagram. Though, flickr has missed an opportunity for the way people share spontaneous iPhone pics. A lot of people still use a real camera and upload their pics in batches.

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.

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.

Facebook owns them. I imagine even if they provide this option for you, it will be opt-out, and they will opt you back in when they feel like it..

"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."

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

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.

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

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.

They should probably find a way to make Emojis work

Did Facebook bring about this change? Interesting.

Why don't numbers have commas?

I wonder the same thing about youtube views count

I do see commas on YouTube's views count.

I sometimes see commas on YouTube's views count, seriously. I think it depends on your location.

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

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.

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

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.

Why would they need to for what amounts to a simple gallery view?

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?

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

Hmm. Very pinteresting.

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