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In any case, even today, Instagram doesn’t allow users to post via desktop. Of course, that would present all of the same problems as Instagram currently does for businesses, so it’s all moot. I figure that a mobile-only social network today would be more viable and wouldn’t even have to open up to desktop visibility. I imagine that if Instagram were to be created today, in the days of mobile saturation and dominance, it would look a lot more like SnapChat. This is fine for a casual user looking to get a little higher resolution views of images or engage while they’re stuck at work, but it’s not great for businesses. All you can do is browse users, follow users, and engage with photos. These days, you can log in to Instagram via a desktop browser, but you can’t create an account – you need the mobile app for that – and you can’t upload images. The reason for this is that they eventually were forced to open themselves up to desktop users. In fact, I would argue that Instagram was somewhat ahead of the game. This was in the early days of mobile dominance, when smartphones were reaching close to the current levels of saturation but people were still figuring out what they could do with them.
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It was, in fact, touted as one of if not the first entirely mobile social network. When Instagram was created, long before Facebook thought about buying it, it was a mobile app.
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