The lawyers over at Instagram caused a major ruckus for the users of the popular social media and photo sharing tool yesterday when Instagram released new Terms of Service language that made it appear that beginning in January, users’ photos might be used in advertisements without any notification or profit sharing for the photographers who took the photos. This morning, this led to a host of Facebook and Twitter posts in my feeds about people bailing on Instagram and giving the new Flickr apps a chance as an alternative.
The folks at Instagram hope you’ll wait and reconsider. A few minutes ago they posted a blog piece – Thank you, and we’re listening.
We will see if this clarifying blog post will help stem the tide of defections from Instagram, but this whole incident is a great reminder that when it comes to building a social media presence for your company, government or idea, you can’t afford to put all of your resources in one tool.