Thoughts on Instagram's Online Profiles

Does the above screenshot look familiar to you? It's Instagram. No, really. On Monday, Instagram started to roll out online profiles. Now, you can easily browse photos without using a third-party website like Followgram. This change was very likely a result of Instagram being acquired by Facebook. While you may not have yours loaded yet, it's only a matter of time before the entire community lives outside the mobile app. I'm not sure what to think of the development. See some of my pros and cons below:

What I Like

• The slideshow collage is visually appealing and fits well with the Facebook banner design.
• The thumbnail layout is very clean and shows the number of comments and likes on rollover.
• Photos are each labeled with a date and grouped by months. No more of that 178 days ago confusion.
• Clicking on a photo enlarges it without compromising quality. Great for saving photos to your computer.
• You can easily edit your user profile in a window much larger than a smartphone screen.

What I Don't Like

• I prefer the photos living only inside the mobile app and being used to compliment tweets and other posts.
• You cannot click on the Following or Follower counts (even on your own profile) to find other user profiles.
• It's alarmingly easy to accidentally report a user by clicking on their username. I almost reported myself.
• As you scroll down, sometimes images automatically load, while other times you have to click a button to load more.
• There is no search box to find other user profiles. You would have to know their username and edit the page's URL.

The jury is still out for me on whether it was necessary for Instagram to create these online profiles, but Facebook must be feeling the heat since it was rumored that Twitter would add a photo filtering option. In either case, it's nice to have an official Instagram feed to link to from my blog. What do you think of the new profiles? Is yours loaded yet?