Picture sharing and Explore tab now available on Instagram Mobile Website

Instagram is expanding some more functionalities beyond their smartphone app versions, in a bid to acquire more users from around the world where cutting edge technology, smartphones and high speed internet are not easily available. Starting today, users can upload photos from the Instagram mobile website.

Earlier, the Instagram mobile website, and desktop website acted simply as window which allowed users to act as spectators for Instagram proceedings where they could look at and Like their friend’s pictures, search and read their notifications. Although you can still not post pictures from the desktop website, this small step is a welcome one.

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Instagram spoke to TechCrunch saying the following, “Instagram.com (accessed from mobile) is a web experience optimized for mobile phones. It’s designed to help people have a fuller experience on Instagram no matter what device or network they are on.”

Instagram Mobile Website also boasts of a new basic version of the Explore tab which makes sure Mobile Website users have new discoverable content at their disposal all the time.

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This new update follows Facebook’s approach of targeting developing countries with an untapped reservoir of potential new users, which has helped the core Facebook platform register 1.94 billion users last week. This astonishing number was made possible through Facebook Lite which has helped Facebook amass 200 million users.

Facebook also offers a Lite version for the Messenger app, which once again was built for a similar purpose and has helped Messenger grow to more than a billion users joining its parent company in the elite club.

The company just registered 700 million users last month, taking just four months to go from 600 million to 700 million, which is just incredible.

Instagram being a photo based app consumes a lot of data, and occupies a considerable amount of storage on devices which needless to say is not a desirable trait for users armed with sketchy internet reception/affordability and low end handsets.

For this very reason, Instagram had also begun experimenting with Offline functionalities which the company revealed as a part of their agenda for the Facebook F8 conference, which as we reported  could have involved “pre-loading content from time to time, or when the device is connected to WiFi.”