(Screencap: Webstagram)

Today, Instagram announced a new feature called profile pages, a web-friendly way to browse the photo-sharing app. With this news, one of Betabeat's favorite websites is close to being rendered obsolete: Webstagram, the backdoor way to view Instagram profiles on the web.

Alas, poor Webstagram--we hardly knew ye. Sprung to plug a gap that even the Valencia filter couldn't fill, you gave us the gift of viewing Instagram on a normal-sized screen. The crick in our necks from hovering over our iPhones soon subsided, the headaches borne of squinting melted away. Now, we could browse photos of Kim K.'s cat planning its imminent suicide from the comfort of our laptops; we could witness Lena Dunham's haircut evolution without our thumbs getting tired.

Your search mechanism gave us new meaning, allowing us to collect gossipy photos of of tech all-stars burning through summer vacay dough like VC money is forever. And when we didn't have cell service, or our data plan was acting janky because when is it ever not, we knew we could always head over to Webstagram to get our filter fix.

We could easily drag and drop photos onto our desktop without having to pull that bullshitty screencap maneuver. We could browse the "cat" tag during the commercials between House Hunters. We could like and comment on our friends' photos without worrying about every terrifying autocorrect scenario in the book.

You made all of these things possible, but now with Instagram profile pages, your services may no longer be needed. As one commenter pointed out, Instagram profile pages still won't have a search function, but we know your days are numbered.

Thank you.

And goodbye.

Ye olde troubled waters. (Photo: flickr.com/brokentrinkets)

Fast Company decided it was time to check in on the Hipstamatic guys. How've things been since the Instagram acquisition made them look like the losers in the photo app head-to-head? Well, no one expected everything would be happiness and fun times. But the picture that emerges in the second installment of a three-part series on the company sounds a lot like Lord of the Flies set in Silicon Valley. 

In the very first line, CEO Lucas Buick admits that, in the last year, the company has lost focus. Twitter expressed interest in an acquisition, sources say, but the idea wasn't taken too seriously. Attempts to transition to social have been rocky.

But it sounds like matters haven't been helped by a cultural rift within the company. Outlined in painful detail is a gulf between the founders and the developers the employees (many of them developers) hired once the company was up and running:

As Buick tells me, his founding team, which was composed mostly of designers, "never operated [Hipstamatic] as a software company. As we started building that type of company, we ended up with really talented engineers who were not used to our creative process. There was tension. There was separation on the teams."

No joke. Sources told Fast Company that the designer-heavy founding team referred to themselves as "the Wolfpack," which went over about as well as you might imagine it would. Said one developer who's since left the company: “'I shit you not: They’d actually be like, "Wolfpack is going to lunch," or "Wolfpack just got back from Vegas,"' recalls Norrie. 'It was like, good god.'"

As Fast Company tells it, the tension culminated in a fight over whether to use Adobe's publishing platform for the company's Snap Magazine or build their own system, wherein Mr. Buick reportedly straight-up flipped off one of his developers:

"I remember I was like, 'You're completely wrong. I can pull up graphs on my computer and show you how much faster we can build it,'" Soffes recalls. "And he goes, 'I got two graphs for you.' And then he gave me the finger in both hands."

Another source corroborates:

"The entire company basically saw the CEO of this company give the double finger to a developer," Wight says. "It wasn't in jest either. It was, 'I'm angry, so fuck off.' Lucas walked out. That pretty much sums up the company for me. You just don't do that as the CEO."

It sounds like everyone involved maybe just needs to take a chill pill. As much as Betabeat cringes at the cutesy talk of "Just Keep Shipping," this might be the one situation where we'd recommend postering the office with the motto--it certainly couldn't hurt.

UPDATE: Former Hipstamatic developer Jonathan Wight--one of the people laid off in August, and one of the sources quoted in Fast Company's piece--writes in to say the conflict at the company was less a matter of design feuding with development, but rather one of founding team versus everyone else:

Designers _were_ laid off when Hipstamatic shed 1/2 their company. A more correct take on the story would be "Founders vs Employees". All employees (excluding the PR) were laid off and all founders (friends in college) were kept - including the "director of fun". Needless to say the director of fun didn't make the lay off a particularly fun experience. The group laid off all tried to work together to make Hipstamatic a great product but unfortunately the leadership of the company was just frankly plain weird.

Mr. The Creator

In its first day on the Android platform, Instagram, the massively-popular photo-sharing service that's already captivated the Steve Jobs set, clocked 1 million downloads. But not everyone is pleased.

As it turns out, Odd Future's Tyler the Creator, who has 20,685 followers on Instagram and was recently voted the top rapper to follow, is something of an Android-hater. Yesterday, the outspoken 21-year-old tweeted out the following:

EWW BROKE ASS ANDROID NIGGAS HAVE INSTAGRAM. IF YOU HAVE THAT PHONE YOU ARE A BROKE ASS DUSTY DICK WHITE PANTS WEARING ASS NIGGA. SMH.

— Tyler, The Creator (@fucktyler) April 4, 2012

Eww, indeed. This from the same charmer whose Twitter bio reads "I AM NOT A DYKE"? Quel surprise!

Don't fret Android users, you're in good company. Odd Future fanatics will recall the rapper once lyrically threatened B.o.B. and Bruno Mars.

Time to make Tracks

It's been an interesting path for Tracks, a mobile photo sharing app that hopes to connect users around what it calls the "experience graph". "We came out at TechCrunch disrupt in May," says founder Vic Singh. "But then we relaunched in September and found some real traction. That let us put together a seed round and it feels great to go into the new year with some momentum and capital,"

Today the company announced a $1 million seed round from General Catalyst, TMT Investments, Eniac Ventures (where Mr. Singh is a general partner), AppFund, BHV Ventures, Harbor Road Ventures, Atventure.us, and a handful of angels investors including Photobucket founder Alex Welch, who will be joining the company's board. "It's a big validation to us that Alex is so interested in the company, given his history in photos."

Mr. Welch built up Photobucket into one of the web's biggest photo sharing sites, eventually selling it to Fox Interactive for $250 million. “I’ve spent time with Vic and the Tracks team for the last few months and was continually impressed with their maniacal focus on building a beautiful product and their ability to crystallize a powerful and big vision around mobile social networks” said Mr. Welch in today's press release.

Tracks lets users build micro-social networks. So, for example, a group of users could make a track for their vacation, making it simple for them all to share photos to the same place and interact with them. Tracks can be pegged to a certain location or span of time, so there are comparisons to be made to the original Color. Users could create a track that lasts for the duration of the Super Bowl, for example, and allows people within a certain range of the stadium to contribute.

"We're not at the hockey stick growth just yet," says Mr. Singh. "But this funding shows we can stand out in a very crowded space."

In the last year New York startup Pixable has moved into a bigger office and expanded from six employees to 28. "Five years ago you took a photo on your camera, downloaded that to your computer, uploaded that to the internet and then emailed your friends. That 20 minute process is now one click and maybe five seconds tops," says Inaki. The company just raised $3.6 million, mainly to build out an optimize their back end for faster speeds.

The company also announced an interesting integration with Aviary, which is now powering the edit tool at the bottom of all Pixable photos. "People love to be able to add a funny sticker or a filter to their images, but we could  not afford to create this functionality ourselves," says Inaki. "Partnering with Aviary was an easy way to bring a new feature set to Pixable without taking away from the core focus of our team."

Right now Pixable is adding about 40,000 new users a week, and increasingly their data shows Facebook as the king of photos. While images are being produced on other services, Inaki says 85% eventually make their way onto Facebook, whether it's the newsfeed or part of a full fledged album.