The photo-sharing mobile app Instagram, launched only a few months ago has just released its official real-time API. Instagram is not the first of its kind to open a public API – its direct competitor PicPlz already took this step – but in any case this is great news for the two million people who are sharing pictures and comments on the popular photo sharing network.
Thanks to the Instagram API, third-party developers will be able to create new apps and tools based on the photos that are being published to Instagram. The API is read-only at the moment, and enables developers to grab images according to tags, locations and geographies as they’re posted to the network.
The Instagram API is an important stage in the spreading of this app – currently only available for the iPhone – to other platforms and applications. You can already see it in action in Foodspotting, a food-sharing app, and Dropbox, a file-storage service. The first one will display all your Instagram photos tagged with #food or #foodspotting, while the second one will create an automatic backup copy of your Instagram images in the cloud. Other apps and services that plan to make use of Instagram’s API soon are Flipboard and About.me.
According to Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom:
“We really wanted to push our API to the next level to support a new kind of interaction around photos — one that supported the real-time nature of the content that people create on Instagram. We’re really excited about creating a more open platform. We will continue to focus on building our own application for Android, but we see the API as a way to reach more users on more platforms right now”.
