O Noes, the Instagram Sky Is Falling...

[thorfinn]

O Noes, the Instagram Sky Is Falling...

So, the latest buzz about the traps is that Instagram is about add this (text from the iOS app) to it's Terms of Service :

"Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may

Comments

[greylock]

I agree with you but that sort of clause is awful, and I am not a lawyer, but it could go off the rails if your profile started endorsing the KKK or Westboro.

And I expect they'll hide it away in thee terms which no one reads.
Stillm, it's only Instragram.

[thorfinn]

I imagine there may be an actual libel case if they do that. I suspect it's more along the lines of promoting business pages that you've visited or explicitly liked, which is what faceborg do.

[greylock]

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/12/how-to-download-your-instagram-photos-and-kill-your-account/

You may have seen this.

[whipartist]

I guess I'm happy that Instagram's filters were so unappealing to me that I never joined.

[thorfinn]

Oh yeah, the filters are a bit wtf. :-) The only reason I have an account is because I'm a username claim jumper - I don't really use it much.

[damien_wise]

As someone who loves photography (the creative act, and appreciating the work of others), I can heartily say that Instagram's 'filters' are utter pants, and have no redeeming aesthetic value whatsoever. A pox on that shitty image-processing.

[lnr]

I note that the existing terms have a similar clause, which though less explicit does seem to allow much the same anyway

[thorfinn]

Yup. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with using an ad supported service (I am, after all, on lots of them), provided the service actually fits a use case you have, and you don't have anything on there that's high risk if compromised. It's more that one should expect that there is a high risk that the service may not continue to serve you well at some point, since you're not the customer.

This is also why it boggled me when people leapt from Facebook into the arms of Google+, using the excuse that somehow Google was more trustworthy on privacy (when they'd already demonstrated several ways that they aren't, and might even actually be actively worse than Facebook, which is difficult).

[damien_wise]

The whole situation boils down to this: if you are not paying for the service, you are not the customer.

These days, it looks more like: if you're not the customer, you're the product.
That is, places like Facebook and LinkedInLeakedIn are more than happy for you to enter your personal information, your likes and dislikes, who and what gets your attention, and professional history, because it's all a marketable commodity, and there are many, many dataminers, governments, and advertisers who're willing to pay handsomely for information that lets them track or target you more effectively

[thorfinn]

Flickr suffers from the Yahoo problem all over - they just haven't kept pace with the modern web and mobile devices. They could have, quite easily, they just haven't. Classic "incumbent" problem - they don't even understand what the new challengers (who have long since run way past where they are) are doing, let alone keep pace with them.

[damien_wise]

So true!
Standing still in such a fast-moving/competitive industry is doom. Flickr was quite good about 10 years ago...but apart from some very minor UI tweaks they haven't grown/improved it since. Yahoo's other main products were search and web-mail, so I don't think they'll regain that lost ground. I understand they were something of a "Web Portal", back when that was the thing to be. *scratches head*
I raised Flickr as an example because they had one of the largest photo-libraries in the world at one stage. They used a freemium business model, and (importantly to me) respected rights of users/creators. No reason why that combination isn't a good foundation for a business model.

[thorfinn]

Oh, definitely. And yes, yahoo was basically the first big "web portal", when the web was small enough that was actually possible to browse a categorised tree of websites and get somewhere useful. (Heck, I still have my printed copy of The Internet Yellow Pages which has a very tiny number of websites in it and a lot of other long obsoleted Internet resource protocols.) Those days are long long gone, by more than a decade. Honestly, I hope their new CEO does some serious culture change work - they need it, or they're going to be dead and gone soon, not just a bit dated.

As for freemium + good rights support, most definitely a viable business model. Vimeo is doing that today in the video space, and doing a very good job of keeping pace with the modern web and mobile.