Instagram hit a major milestone during Hurricane Sandy: 800,000 photos tagged as "#sandy" were uploaded.
Granted, that's not an incredibly significant amount of photos when you consider how Facebook users upload 300 million images a day.
But it highlights a key way Instagram differs from Facebook, which recently acquired the photo-sharing network: Users spontaneously organize around so-called hashtags like "#sandy," giving the site a very different feel than Facebook's people-oriented photos.
And it's noteworthy that Hurricane Sandy "was probably the single largest event taking place that was captured on Instagram," Kevin Systromsaid at the GigaOm Roadmap conference today.
Systrom compared the number of photos to the most recent Super Bowl, where users uploaded 85,000 relatedimages.
And as Mashable notes, when you take into account pictures not only tagged with #sandy, but related terms like #hurricanesandy and #frankenstorm, the upload number jumps to 1.3 million photos.
Still, there seemed to be far more activity on Twitter, with 20 million tweets referencing Hurricane Sandy between Oct. 27 and Nov. 1, though it's not clear how many of those messages included photos. On Facebook, Hurricane Sandy became the second-most popular topic in the U.S. on the social network this year.
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