Instagram has revealed it has surpassed the 100 million monthly active user mark, nearly two-and-a-half years after its launch.
This follows Instagram's first release of user numbers in January, amid speculation that the outcry over its new terms of service resulted in users dropping the service altogether. At the time, Instagram said it had 90 million monthly active users, and that it was continuing to see strong global growth.
By way of comparison, in December last year, Twitter announced it had surpassed the 200 million monthly active user mark - six years after its launch. According to an Instagram engineering post last month, the service processes 10 000 likes per second at peak.
Instagram CEO and co-founder, Kevin Systrom, says of the active user milestone: "It's easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company, but I think the truth is that it's an accomplishment for our community. Now, more than ever, people are capturing the world in real-time using Instagram - sharing images from the farthest corners of the globe. What we see as a result is a world more connected and understood through photographs."
Earlier this month, Instagram also officially released a full-blown Web feed, which allows users to browse user profiles and images, making the service more accessible to Web users.
The service itself, however, remains mobile-first and the purpose of the Web feed is simply browsing and engagement. At the time of the launch, Systrom said the firm had focused on building a mobile-only service first because at its core, Instagram is about "seeing and taking photos on the go".
Systrom says: "Images have the ability to connect people from all backgrounds, languages and cultures. They connect us to aid workers halfway across the world in Sudan, to entrepreneurs in San Francisco and even to events in our own backyards. Instagram, as a tool to inspire and connect, is only as powerful as the community it is made of."
In recent months, competition has heated up between Instagram and Twitter, the micro-blogging service that formed an integral part of Instagram's early success. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 as it ramped up its photo-sharing services, and as Instagram has continued to grow, so too has the rivalry with Twitter.
Last year, Twitter revoked Instagram's access to the "Find Twitter Friends" API. Instagram subsequently announced it was disabling support for Twitter Cards and thereby disallowing Instagram images from actually being visible in the tweet stream. Instead, users can now only tweet links to Instagram images, which link back to Instagram itself.
At the time, Systrom said the move made sense for the company as it wanted to direct users to the new Instagram Web site. Firing back, Twitter then released an update to its mobile apps that added Instagram-like photo-editing features to its own photo-sharing capabilities.
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