Instagram announced Monday that it’s rolling out web profile pages for the first time which look — perhaps not surprisingly — very similar to Facebook, Instagram’s parent company. “You’ve asked for Instagram on the web and we’ve listened,” explains a blog post announcing the new feature. The roll out will take several days, but a few media companies are among the early launches, like powerhouse MTV (which is nearing one million followers):
And NBC News…
Beyond just displaying your latest photos (you can’t select which ones you want to appear in the “cover” area), you can follow users, comment and like photos and edit your profile information from the web. Until now, Instagram has been a mobile-only experience — you couldn’t link your Instagram page from your blog, for example — but the new web profile pages should help popularize the service even more.
With all that scale, Instagram has turned into a giant crowd-photo experience. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said Hurricane Sandy was the platform’s most documented event ever with users tagging 800,000 photos with the “#Sandy” hashtag, compared to about 85,000 photos tagged with the Super Bowl hashtag this year.
No wonder Twitter is adding Instagram-like photo filters to its app, according to a NY Times report.
By the way, a recent survey found 54% of the top 100 brands are now on Instagram.
