Instagram, the super popular photo-sharing app owned by Facebook, has expand its presence online by launching Instagram profiles on the Web. The site will roll out the new feature this week. Users can access their online profile, with the URL instagram.com/[username].

Here is more from Instagram’s blog: “Your web profile features a selection of your recently shared photographs just above your profile photo and bio, giving others a snapshot of the photos you share on Instagram. In addition, you can follow users, comment & like photos and edit your profile easily and directly from the web.”

The pages look a lot like a social network profile pages, dominated by images. You can see Mycookingdiary‘s page pictured left. Companies are also taking advantage of the new feature. Check out Nike’s page here.  Read more

Instacane.com, a site built by Facebook employee Chris Akerman and software engineer Peter Ng, is documenting the progress of Hurricane Sandy through a collection of individual updates on Instagram. The site follows the hashtags of Instagram users affected by Sandy and displays an array of images from different people experiencing the storm.

The photos are a great detour from the giant graphics we’ve been seeing that show most of the Eastern Seaboard all in red. They show sobering images from the trenches of the storm like this photo (pictured left) from hoeboma of Atlantic City flooding and shots of flooding in Manhattan.

It’s also got a collection of images of hurricane preparations, from empty store shelves to cabinets well stocked with water, packaged foods and beer. There are, of course, some silly pics. (Via TechCrunch).

I think the true measure of the popularity of a mobile app is when someone releases a desktop version. Instagram is now one of the handful of apps which can make that claim.

May I present Instagrille.

This app seems to have been out for a while now, but I just heard about it today. It’s an HTML5 based app which is designed to run on the Pokki app framework. It’s free, and it lets heck your feed, see your notifications, and make comments. You even have the option of downloading photos to your computer.

Now, I’m not one to do a lot of photography, but I can say that this is a sweet app. It’s remarkably lightweight, and when minimized it runs in my taskbar without using any appreciable resources.  It’s definitely worth getting.

If you don’t have a PC, you can find a similar app for OSX called Carousel. It costs $2 in iTunes.

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Instagrille