Instagram Moves One Step Closer To A Full Blown Website

The widely popular smartphone photo sharing site Instagram is moving a tad closer to a full blown web experience as today the company unveiled a Web-based version of the site's newsfeed, which is available to all users now at Instagram.com. This new photo-feed option, allows the service's 90 million monthly active users browser based access to view photos from the people they follow just as they do inside the mobile applications.

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.

Instagram has been working on project to build on the sites mobile foundation since November when the site started rolling out Web-based profiles, allowing people to view their own pics at instagram.com/[username], but this feature was limited to a user's own photo's and none of those of their friends. Today's announcement incorporates more access to the features found in the mobile application, but not all. For instance you still can't upload pictures or explore the site to browse up and coming items.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said in a blog post that the companies primary focus was originally built on the mobile since its Oct. 2010 launch. The point of Instagram, after all, "is about seeing and taking photos on-the-go." However, in the months since being acquired by Facebook, Instagram has seen huge growth; it now ranks in the tops among social media and photo sharing sites. "To make Instagram even more accessible to our growing community ... you can now browse your Instagram feed on the web – just like you do on your mobile device," Systrom wrote.