Sri Lanka’s InstaWaves Turns Instagram Hashtags into a Pictorial Story (Sort of)

InstaWaves is an interesting website submitted to us from Sri Lanka. It’s created by Sapumal Ahangama, who wants to track trends on Instagram with hashtags. Ahangama said that even though Instagram has a popular pages feature, the page doesn’t necessarily show trends.

So Sapumal decided to built one focused on trends and InstaWaves came into being. Users are able to track a particular event based on hashtags, which get fresh updates on the site every ten minutes. For example, you can follow #VSFashionShow to find out what images people are sharing about the latest Victoria’s Secrets fashion show. You can also share, like, and comment just like it was on Instagram.

I don’t think InstaWaves’ design is as good as it could be. But I do think that it provides a pictorial storytelling approach for users to consume content, like the way you can use Storify to contextualize Twitter posts about a certain event. By following a hashtag on Instagram, users understand the story in pictures. It’s a clever use of user-generated content, so I thought that was pretty cool as soon as I saw it. But if only InstaWaves could look sharper and feel more like a pictorial storybook – that would be even more awesome, wouldn’t it?