Google Street View now includes the scenic railways of Switzerland as well as the interior of selected businesses and buildings, but google’s latest foray is also its most impressive – send a Streetview camera down the Amazon Bason, mapping the rivers and estuaries. The project was designed to celebrate World Forest Day and is now available on google Street View.

Google captured more than 50,000 still images, which were then stitched together to create a 360º experience. This is what they say on their blog:

Take a virtual boat ride down the main section of the Rio Negro, and float up into the smaller tributaries where the forest is flooded. Stroll along the paths of Tumbira, the largest community in the Reserve, or visit some of the other communities who invited us to share their lives and cultures. Enjoy a hike along an Amazon forest trail and see where Brazil nuts are harvested. You can even see a forest critter if you look hard enough!

Instagram, the hugely popular photo filtering and sharing iPhone app, has entered a partnership with Hipstamatic, another iPhone camera app, Fast Company reports. This will allow Hipstamatic users to post images to their Instagram stream directly from the app.

While Instagram has always been good at allowing users to share images across a wide variety of networks, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others, this is the first time they are opening the Instagram ecosystem up to images taken with another app.

Those of us who use both apps, we’ve got a number of Instagram fans here at fisheye, will probably react with surprise to these developments – like Instagram, Hipstamatic offers a variety of filters to the iPhone user, creating images with an analogue, old-school look, which makes for a bit of a duplicate offering.

As Instagram continues to grow, with a soon to be released Android app reportedly in the works, this is the first of potentially many more partnerships, making the platform more and more open.