When Instagram was purchased by Facebook early on last year, many devotees feared their treasured app would simply become an extension of the social network. To Mark Zuckerberg's credit, he's kept to his promise of allowing Instagram to retain its identity, but in an update released simultaneously today for both iOS and Android, the famed photo tagging feature has just been added to the Instagram repertoire.
Instagram is without a doubt something of a runaway success, and it managed that even before the famous buyout by social network, Facebook. A combination of smart filters and a social aspect, Instagram had us all taking arty photos of our food, cats and just about anything else. We love Instagram, and judging by our feeds, you probably do too.
Instagram has turned into more than a mere photo sharing app over the years. Culminating in its huge sale to Facebook, Instagram has embedded itself into the digital worlds of many of us, and thanks to the recent release of an Android app, Instagram is no longer an iOS-only affair. But Instagram has managed to pull something off that most apps can only dream of - it's left the digital world and found its way into the physical world, too.
Screenstagram 2.0 is now available, enables you to set instagram based screensaver on Mac or your Windows PC. Download it from here.
Instagram has been nothing short of a revelation in its short lifespan. What started out as an app for iPhone now spans multiple devices and platforms, and having been purchased by Facebook last year for an eye-watering one billion dollars, its rise is quite rightly seen as landmark achievement. The app itself however, which allows users to take, edit, share and comment on photos, is certainly not as feature-rich as some would like, and the lack of ability to save photos - as one can on the Web - is certainly a limitation. It's not the be-all, end-all of the Instagram experience, yet is still kind of annoying, but much like the new-found ability to copy text from the Facebook News Feed, a tweak for jailbroken iPhones has been developed to facilitate the saving of Instagram photos from your News Feed directly to the device's camera roll.
There have been signs over the past few months that an Instagram Web service was drawing ever closer to completion. For a while now, it has been possible for Instagrammers to check photos and view profiles through an ordinary browser, but as of today, the beloved Feed - which serves an almost identical purpose to the News Feed of Facebook, it's now-owner - has now also been unleashed online.
If you are an unforgiving Instagram member who has been actively using the photo-sharing service from the beginning, then the recent well-publicized change to the company's terms of service could be the final trigger point needed to make you cut all ties with the network. If you are one of the ones who have been around from the beginning and have uploaded countless photographs to share with your followers, then all is not lost, thanks to the new Freethephotos service that allows users to easily migrate their uploaded Instagram images across to a Flickr account.
One of key promises made by Mark Zuckerberg upon Facebook's acquisition of Instagram, was that the image-sharing network would retain its own identity, and would not simply become a Facebook-branded product. Thankfully for Instagram fans, that promise has been delivered upon hitherto, although an update to Instagram's privacy policy suggests its Facebook integration will grow a great deal stronger over the coming months.
If there's one certainty in life, especially in the world of technology, it's that someone somewhere probably thinks they can do whatever you do, but better. People think they would make a better job of running Facebook or Twitter. That they know how Google should move forward with Android and, sometimes, they even know how to write awesome tech articles. Who knew?!
Remember the old Instagram Socialmatic Camera Concept we discussed in detail back in May? Well, as it turns out, the folks behind the concept are now working on turning the concept into reality with a mass manufactured digital-camera-shaped-like-the-Instagram-logo that lets you shoot, edit, and share / print tree easy steps.
