Instaloss

So what can a service do to lose many of its users? Well, Instagram did it but changing it's terms of service by giving themselves the permission to use its users' photos in advertisements (particularly Facebook ads). There is no doubt that Instagram has lost users (and will continue to); services that create/backup copies of user photos have seen a dramatic increase in traffic.

This just adds to the downfall of Instagram, in my opinion. Last week Instagram discontinued its support for Twitter cards so users must click on the link to the Instagram photo to view it. They are no longer viewable within the Twitter interface. And through my personal experience, 90% of all Instagram pictures, I saw, were on Twitter. While Instagram did see increase traffic on their site the past week, I can't see this continuing since Twitter now has the same functionality (those damn filters). This was probably under direction from Facebook since they purchased Instagram for a cool billion dollars. Facebook hasn't responded very well to Twitter, first terrible support for Tweets on Facebook, then "subscribers" changed to "followers", now this. It was always uncertain how Instagram was going to produce profits and now Facebook's decision to steal personal photos for their advertisements seems to have backfired. 

How does a company like Facebook make a move to change their terms of agreement without surveying their user base? Did they think no one would notice or did they think it was going to be favorable with their users? Being a social networking company, I would expect them to care more. Why would you decrease the integration with other services? (Afraid of compeitition?) Well, looks like services like Flickr will raise up since it easily integrates with Facebook/Twitter/Google+/etc. (Flickr is a great application, by the way).

And something I've noticed, Facebook has been using its users as companies'/brands' spokespeople. Basically advertisements are shown with "Friend likes this company" in "related" posts. This makes me very hesitant in "liking" certain companies/pages (Basically, I don't "like" anything anymore).