Instagram now has 130 million monthly users, 16 billion images uploaded

As Facebook announced Instagram’s video shooting features at the big, mystery event yesterday, the service’s co-founder Kevin Systrom announced some major growth statistics of the photo-sharing service.

Instagram now boasts of over 130 million monthly active users (MAU), a good rise from 100 million MAU in February this year. Systrom also announced that a whopping 16 billion images have been uploaded to the service and over one billion likes passed around on it.

With Instagram’s foray into video-shooting, the numbers are only bound to rise. The service was enabled with being able to shoot 15 second long videos as an update to the apps yesterday. Instagram will let you choose from 13 filters to add to your video and share them with your friends.

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130 million active users!

To enhance badly shot videos, Instagram has unveiled Cinema, a feature exclusive to iPhone 4S and iPhone 5. Cinema will let you stabilise your video to give you nearly-perfect videos despite the shakiness.

By enabling Instagram with video, Facebook has wandered deep into Twitter’s territory. The micro-blogging website’s Vine service that lets you shoot 6 second long videos is probably what sparked Instagram’s need to add video to its service off.

What tilts the balance in Instagram’s favour currently is that it has 130 million MAUs, a ready market for video. While Vine had to start from scratch and won fans solely by the virtue of being one of the first services to have a mini-video facility, Instagram has a huge fan base to fall upon.

Instagram’s update with video shooting capabilities is out for iOS and Android. A word of caution though: heartbreaking as it sounds, if you’re on Android, you will only be able to shoot videos if your device runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and up. It will be possible for you to view videos on all Android devices that run Instagram, though. The company has said that it is working “round the clock to enable capturing videos on many more Android devices.”