Instagram has been moving towards this for the past few months

Feb 6, 2013 07:51 GMT  ·  By

Given all of the recent moves, this was only a matter of time, Instagram is now a full-blown web service, you can now check out your feed on the web just like you would in the app. Instagram was one of the few truly mobile first companies and it's safe to say it pulled it off.

Still, it's bringing it back full circle by now offering a pretty complete product on the web as well. With this latest addition, Instagram becomes a competitor to quite a few existing platforms, Tumblr in particular, but also Twitter.

"Our focus on building out a mobile-only experience is a unique path that we’ve chosen for many reasons, the most important of which is that Instagram, at its core, is about seeing and taking photos on-the-go," Instagram's Kevin Systrom explained.

"However, to make Instagram even more accessible to our growing community, at the end of last year we started to expand to the desktop web, giving you the ability to see profiles from instagram.com," he said.

"To continue that path, as of today, you can now browse your Instagram feed on the web – just like you do on your mobile device," he added.

In the new web stream, you should be able to do pretty much everything you can in the mobile app. You'll get all the photos from the people you follow, you can like photos and you can go visit the profiles of your friends just like you have been able to for the past few months.

The site doesn't look bad at all, Instagram keeps things simple and it pays off. While it does make the most out of the new space allowed by a larger screen, the simple single-column feed means the site works on pretty much anything, including tablets, mobile phones that aren't Androids or iPhones and so on.

In fact, that's probably a big part of the appeal, with the site, Instagram can cater to mobile platforms that it wouldn't be able to put out a proper native app for.

The only limitation is that you can't upload photos from the web, that's still only possible from the mobile apps. It makes sense too, while it is possible to upload photos you didn't shoot yourself to Instagram, people rarely go through the trouble. Making it possible to upload photos from the web would definitely change that and inundate Instagram with all sorts of photos that don't belong there.