reuters:

Instagram learns how to Move Fast and Break Things

Instagram backtracks on privacy changes following “Move Fast and Break Things” ethos of parent company, Facebook - Tech Tonic on Reuters TV

We went through this at TextAmerica (which I helped launch and operate for four very long years WAY back in 2002). The issue with a service like this is the owners of the service don’t want to have to wait to publish photos from users elsewhere if it is suddenly urgent to do so.

Clara Camera Phone might be busy at work or in class (or taking a nap or something) when her iPhone picture of something she just happened to witness while walking to work become national news. Of course she’d love for the world to see the picture, but without the correct legal agreement in place, the owner of a service like InstaFace-gram-book thingy could and would end up having to settle for using that photo without permission of the user decided to do something about it. Waiting 10 minutes is out of the question. An hour and it’s over. This is the Internet, you know!?

We had a small (very small) uproar about our legalese and similar TOS clause—and we did the same thing in the aftermath, announcing something like “your photos are always yours and we have no intention of selling your photos”. It’s only in a very rare set of circumstances that something is important enough for an online service to want to syndicate content. The social advertising space hadn’t been born yet, but we knew it would (at TA). I’m glad to see it has begun to evolve. I’d sure love to be part of the game when someone gets it right.

Oh, and great video editing there at the end by Reuters guy. Seriously. Add some text here already, will ya? ;-)

(via soupsoup)