Instagram, the iOS photo sharing app, launched last fall and quickly rose to the status of iPhone app darling, hitting the 1 million user landmark in a mere 10 weeks. Why? Instagram is a beautiful, well-designed app that just works. In creating the app, Instagram passed over one thing that most companies consider a standard requirement – a website.
Recently, the company released an API for developers to expand on this minimal app and one developer has done just that with Gramfeed – a (nearly) fully-functioning Web version of Instagram.
Rakshith Krishnappa says that he hacked together Gramfeed over the weekend that is “designed to be a Twitter-like Web client for Instagram.” Right now, you can view your stream of friends photos, view your friends’ individual streams, see your and their followers, search for people and view popular photos. It’s most of what you can do on your iPhone on the Web.
Gramfeed not only makes it easy to browse your Instagram feed on the Web, giving you the ability to see much larger version of photos, but it also makes it easy to share your and friend’s photos on Twitter and Facebook.
What it’s missing, however, is interaction, but Krishnappa says this is next on the list. Commenting, liking photos and adding friends are on the way and should be available within the next day or two. The only thing he won’t be adding, as it isn’t available as part of the Instagram API, is the uploading of pictures. So, if you were hoping Gramfeed could serve as a mobile Web version of Instagram for Android, it looks like your out of luck.
Krishnappa says that he isn’t only going to create a Web version of Instagram, but that he hopes to take it a step further with location visualization. Right now, the mobile app will show you where an individual picture is located on a map, but that’s the extent of location. Krishnappa plans on doing more with map visualization by integrating Tweets, Foursquare check-ins and other location data. He does, after all, have experience in this realm. Last time we caught up with Krishnappa, he was creating MisoTrendy, a Google Maps and Foursquare mashup that helped users figure out the hot spots according to Foursquare check-ins.
