Last week the Verge ran a story noting that poplar photo-sharing service Instagram was headed to Windows Phone this fall. Later, VentureBeat squashed those rumors saying that ‘no’ in fact Instagram is not being developed for Windows Phone, either 7 or 8.
An eagle-eyed viewer started the controversy seeing what looked like an Instagram-like Live Tile pop up during a Nokia promo video. Later, the Verge backtracked noting that instead it may be Vimeo (who do have an updated, Nokia-focused version on the way).
But a new explanation has come forth: Molome.
Is the mystery tile really Molome?
Over on Nokia’s Conversations blog, they ran a story about the extremely popular photo service that is found on Android, Symbian and BlackBerry. One major area of that story was that Molome is coming to Windows Phone too. The service has recently celebrated its 1 millionth download and indeed, it really is a gorgeous website and well-designed app.
Looking closer though and one of our readers noticed that the ‘heart’ and ‘comment’ bubble layout looks a lot like that Live Tile in that video, perhaps bringing an end to this wild internet adventure.
An example of the Molome interface with 'heart' and 'comment' icons
We won’t really know of course until Molome finally launches on Windows Phone and there is not ETA on when that is happening. We’ll just have to keep an eye out.
As far as Instagram coming to Windows Phone? We’re mixed. Two major news sources are flat out contradicting each other and we’ve heard that Microsoft will back alternative services if companies don’t want to play ball (see IHeartRadio and Last.FM versus no Pandora for an example). In other words, if Instagram won't come on board, Molome may be the alternative.
Source: Nokia Conversations, Molo.me; Thanks, Daniel R., for the tip and observation
