Instagram Web Profiles Coming Soon!

The camp over at Instagram Headquarters seems to have been hard at work as of late.  After their billion dollar acquisition over the Summer, I think most people with an eye on either company were expecting big changes on the Facebook mobile end of things.  Specifically, a better camera equipped with filters and a more streamlined uploading system.  What I didn’t expect – but adore – is the upcoming addition of accessible web profiles for Instagram pages.

I, for one, am a huge fan of this idea.  When I started using Instagram last April, the only frustrating thing about the mobile app was that there was no clean or simple way to view a users  picture trail.  For the last six months or so, I’ve been using a great website called Statigram.  At the most basic level it organizes your pictures in a simple fashion, adds categories to pictures and lets the user group their followings however they choose.  It’s also much easier to search for people and hashtags compared to the mobile Instagram application.

From the looks of it (see  below), the Instagram web profile is a marriage of Statigram and Facebook. The pictures are organized in precisely the same fashion with the images in chronological order; the newest image  first and then time increases as you wind left and down the page.  All other elements of the profile are almost replicated from Facebook: the header image is eerily similar to the cover photo we’re now used, the user photo is in the same exact place, and the tally of photos, following and followers takes the place of the types of elements in our Facebook profiles (Photos, Friends, etc…).

All in all, I’m a huge fan and can’t wait until my profile is rolled out to me! However, over time I’d think maintaining independent Facebook and Instagram profiles would become fairly redundant – especially when they look so damn similar.  It would only make sense that overtime, our Facebook  Timeline would incorporate our Instagram Web Profile, which would then render it obsolete.