Photo-sharing social network, Instagram rose to incredible prominence when they were recently purchased by the world’s largest social network, Facebook for a whopping $1 billion. At the time of the acquisition Instagram was fast becoming one of the most popular social networks and was dominating the mobile space because the app was focused on simply allowing users to take a photo from their phone and then share with friends and acquaintances. Facebook has taken the app one step further and given it a home on the web. Users will now be able to share images stored on their PC’s to the social network. Previously they could only do this with mobile devices that ran on Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android.
The move to add PCs to the already in use smartphones and tablets should give the app a wider user base. Facebook claims that the new feature will “make it easier for users to discover each others’ photos.”
As with most moves that Facebook makes, this new one has also been dogged by privacy concerns from critics. The new online Instagram web profile looks a lot like a Facebook page and shows a profile image, short biography and the a grid of images that display all recent uploads. The social network says that profile owner can restrict who has access to their images but people like Nick Pickles of Big Brother Watch are still concerned.
Pickles states that, “A web-based service makes it easier to collect lots of information about people using the service and also makes it easier for people to share photos their friends post. Clearly both of these issues raise privacy questions, and time will tell if the company really has any desire to address them.”
Privacy concerns aside, Facebook has state that, “Instagram is focused on the production of photos from mobile devices so users are not currently able to upload from the web.” That means users can only view or download the images but this should still get people that do not use the service to try it out.
Facebook is trying to make its ecosystem a lot more attractive to advertisers and marketers and should expect better results. Facebook points at Nike’s Instagram web profile as a great way to utilize the new web based abilities of Instagram to promote a brand.
Source: BBC
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