Re-inventing Instagram with Hash49.COM

Instagram has a problem.

It’s quite easy to snap a photo and apply filter from the Instagram app, but what’s the use of your media, if only you or your followers can see it? Digital content accumulated for years stored in the cloud with only select ones being able to see it. How about making it public and easy to navigate?

Another thing, is Instagram’s website user interface, or rather no interface.

It makes it impossible to discover new and interesting users, limiting you to you and your followers media, or search based on one hashtag.

Millions of photos stored in the cloud are seen only by a few.

With this idea in mind, and after finishing another small related project I have decided to build Hash49.COM – a tool to help you discover Instagram media using hashtags.

You can browse what others created on the website without an account, but if you want to have your own collection created based off the hashtaglist you have in mind, go on and create an account. While in the process, you’ll be asked to grant access to your Instagram account – we need that to talk to their servers and fetch the data on your behalf. Don’t worry, we won’t spam or post anything from your name.

Hash49’s screen with #citibike posts

Not only this tool allows you to see interesting media, you might as well find new people to follow.

In addition Hash49 allows you to have multiple keywords in your hashtaglist, making process of exploration better. Say I want to see all#nyc #subway tagged posts and I want to keep it to myself:

Creating new list screen

Here we go, and because of the advanced javascripts this collection will auto update itself while you have the page open:

One of the posts for #nyc, #subway being open full size

Built on Grails, with AngularJS under the hood this website also uses infinite load plugin, making you to never leave the page with never ending media stream.

While this project is under development, I would be happy to hear from you – do you like it? How long did you waste browsing the site? Is it loading fast for you? Do you like the interface?