7 ms·

Announcing Instagram Profiles on the Web

114 points by hornokplease 14y ago

cjstewart88 14y ago
Why don't numbers have commas?
- barredo 14y ago
  I wonder the same thing about youtube views count
  - lleims 14y ago
    I do see commas on YouTube's views count.
    - chris_p 14y ago
      I sometimes see commas on YouTube's views count, seriously. I think it depends on your location.
- uhwuggawuh 14y ago
  Because some places, like Europe, use the comma symbol as the decimal point, so pi would be 3,14159...
  - chris_p 14y ago
    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.
chucknelson 14y ago
These look nice. I assume it's only a matter of time before these are encapsulated in Facebook?
citricsquid 14y ago
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)?
- ErikHuisman 14y ago
  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&oid=9445547199&comments https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977...
- barredo 14y ago
  To fix bugs, to test performance and avoid an massive traffic hit to their servers
yllus 14y ago
Alternate title: "Announcing the serious Facebook competitor that could have been."
- barredo 14y ago
  It only competes with Facebook with one feature.
  - duck 14y ago
    Yes, but you could argue it is the killer feature of Facebook.
    - grinich 14y ago
      And hence, worth a 1% acquisition.
crugej 14y ago
Very interesting. Begs the question to whether facebook plans to disrupt itself with the Instagram acquisition somewhere down the line.
denzil_correa 14y ago
Did Facebook bring about this change? Interesting.
nsns 14y ago
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.
- jonknee 14y ago
  They'll go away. I wouldn't be surprised to see a TOS change soon to ensure that.
- iamben 14y ago
  Just posted the same thing on the other thread. Poor guys. I suspect this will butcher their traffic.
  - acdha 14y ago
    It's an incredibly obvious direction for Instagram to expand in so I'd hope they had some plan for this
    - iamben 14y ago
      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).
      - acdha 14y ago
        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.
  - terhechte 14y ago
    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.
elliottkember 14y ago
Why didn't they just buy http://instagre.at http://instagre.at?
- malandrew 14y ago
  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.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  Why would they need to for what amounts to a simple gallery view?
chris_p 14y ago
It's interesting how the Instagram profile pages look kinda like facebook's. The cover photo, the layout and the way everything is arranged.
elorant 14y ago
Next thing they'll add a bit sharing/voting and there goes Pinterest.
- ry0ohki 14y ago
  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)
  - elorant 14y ago
    Or it could be a wake up call for Flickr.
    - karpathy 14y ago
      Flickr already had at least 10 wake up calls over the last 5 years. They're not answering.
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    I really doubt a service that crops your images to squares at a low maximum resolution is going to compete with Flickr.
  - dustyreagan 14y ago
    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.
state 14y ago
The aesthetic similarity to Facebook is pretty striking. Now you really can see why Instagram was bought, and where it's headed.
- aes256 14y ago
  My initial thought was "Wow, they really ripped off Facebook. How can they get away with this?" Then I remembered...
- runemadsen 14y ago
  I wonder if they are going to flip the "facebook photos is now instagram" switch some time soon?
  - natesm 14y ago
    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).
    - obeattie 14y ago
      Facebook released an update just today that integrates the features from the separate FB Camera app into the main FB app
- veemjeem 14y ago
  The aesthetics are similar to Facebook probably because they're sharing the exact same design team.
  - rbranson 14y ago
    Wrong. The designer of web profiles (Maykel Loomans) joined Instagram before the acquisition and this has been in the works for many months.
kmfrk 14y ago
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 https://instagram.com/accounts/manage_access.
bravoyankee 14y ago
Hmm. Very pinteresting.
fosk 14y ago
It's hard to say if you're not into it, but I wouldn't have sold.
- padraigm 14y ago
  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.
benschwarz 14y ago
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?
8ig8 14y ago
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.
- rbranson 14y ago
  "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."
- loceng 14y ago
  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..
rxooo 14y ago
All I have to say is, About Fucking Time. How did they not have this feature before?
sohlis 14y ago
They should probably find a way to make Emojis work
davecyen 14y ago
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.
nicktal 14y ago
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.
vinayan3 14y ago
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.

114 points by hornokplease 14y ago

cjstewart88 14y ago

Why don't numbers have commas?

barredo 14y ago
I wonder the same thing about youtube views count
- lleims 14y ago
  I do see commas on YouTube's views count.
  - chris_p 14y ago
    I sometimes see commas on YouTube's views count, seriously. I think it depends on your location.
uhwuggawuh 14y ago
Because some places, like Europe, use the comma symbol as the decimal point, so pi would be 3,14159...
- chris_p 14y ago
  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.

chucknelson 14y ago

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

citricsquid 14y ago

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)?

ErikHuisman 14y ago
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&oid=9445547199&comments https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977...
barredo 14y ago
To fix bugs, to test performance and avoid an massive traffic hit to their servers

yllus 14y ago

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

barredo 14y ago
It only competes with Facebook with one feature.
- duck 14y ago
  Yes, but you could argue it is the killer feature of Facebook.
  - grinich 14y ago
    And hence, worth a 1% acquisition.

crugej 14y ago

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

denzil_correa 14y ago

Did Facebook bring about this change? Interesting.

nsns 14y ago

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.

jonknee 14y ago
They'll go away. I wouldn't be surprised to see a TOS change soon to ensure that.
iamben 14y ago
Just posted the same thing on the other thread. Poor guys. I suspect this will butcher their traffic.
- acdha 14y ago
  It's an incredibly obvious direction for Instagram to expand in so I'd hope they had some plan for this
  - iamben 14y ago
    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).
    - acdha 14y ago
      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.
- terhechte 14y ago
  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.

elliottkember 14y ago

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

malandrew 14y ago
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.
ceejayoz 14y ago
Why would they need to for what amounts to a simple gallery view?

chris_p 14y ago

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

elorant 14y ago

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

ry0ohki 14y ago
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)
- elorant 14y ago
  Or it could be a wake up call for Flickr.
  - karpathy 14y ago
    Flickr already had at least 10 wake up calls over the last 5 years. They're not answering.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  I really doubt a service that crops your images to squares at a low maximum resolution is going to compete with Flickr.
- dustyreagan 14y ago
  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.

state 14y ago

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

aes256 14y ago
My initial thought was "Wow, they really ripped off Facebook. How can they get away with this?" Then I remembered...
runemadsen 14y ago
I wonder if they are going to flip the "facebook photos is now instagram" switch some time soon?
- natesm 14y ago
  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).
  - obeattie 14y ago
    Facebook released an update just today that integrates the features from the separate FB Camera app into the main FB app
veemjeem 14y ago
The aesthetics are similar to Facebook probably because they're sharing the exact same design team.
- rbranson 14y ago
  Wrong. The designer of web profiles (Maykel Loomans) joined Instagram before the acquisition and this has been in the works for many months.

kmfrk 14y ago

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 https://instagram.com/accounts/manage_access.

bravoyankee 14y ago

Hmm. Very pinteresting.

fosk 14y ago

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

padraigm 14y ago
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.

benschwarz 14y ago

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?

8ig8 14y ago

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.

rbranson 14y ago
"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."
loceng 14y ago
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..

rxooo 14y ago

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

sohlis 14y ago

They should probably find a way to make Emojis work

davecyen 14y ago

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.

nicktal 14y ago

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.

vinayan3 14y ago

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.