Instagram may have done some quick backtracking on the proposed
changes to its terms of use that outraged its users last week, but not
quickly enough to avoid being sued.
The photo sharing app’s new terms of service, which were to take
effect next month, caused many users to threaten to leave the service.
The wording of the planned terms of use led Instagram users to believe
the company would have the right to grab users pictures and other data
to promote itself on its website or in advertising without mention of or
compensation to the owner of the images.
The lawsuit
claims the proposed changes would “transfer valuable property rights to
Instagram while simultaneously relieving Instagram from any liability
for commercially exploiting customers’ photographs and artistic content,
while shielding Instagram from legal liability.”
The complaint,
filed by San Diego resident Lucy Funes in U.S. District Court in San
Francisco, says Instagram is making a “grab for customer property
rights,” while preventing its users from “obtaining injunctive or
equitable relief.” The planned terms would also “artificially limit the
statute of limitations for all claims against Instagram to one year,”
the suit reads.
The lawsuit
indicates Funes “is acting to preserve valuable and important property,
statutory, and legal rights” before legal claims are “forever barred by
adoption of Instagram’s new terms.”
Under the previously planned terms of use, Instagram said users could
not opt out but could delete their accounts before the changes were to
take effect Jan. 16.
The lawsuit says users who opted to cancel would forfeit the right to
their photos. “In short, Instagram declares ‘possession is nine-tenths
of the law and if you don’t like it, you can’t stop us. ‘” the lawsuit
reads.
Reuters reported Facebook, which owns Instagram, has said the lawsuit
is “without merit” and the social network would “fight it vigorously.”
Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog the photo-sharing
app is not only going back to its October 2010 terms of use, it has no
present plans to roll out any new ad products that would require it to
be changed.
“The concerns we heard about from you the most focused on
advertising, and what our changes might mean for you and your photos,”
Systrom wrote in a blog post. “There was confusion and real
concern about what our possible advertising products could look like
and how they would work. “Because of the feedback we have heard from
you, we are reverting this advertising section to the original version
that has been in effect since we launched the service in October 2010. You can see the updated terms here.”
Systrom also said the Facebook-owned company in the future would
decide what products it wants to offer before changing the terms of use
to ensure company lawyers do not draft a policy that gives the firm more
latitude than it requires.
“Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce
possible advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to
take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users
and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work,” he
wrote.
Post from: SiteProNews
Instagram Sued Over Plan to Change Terms of Use
Showing posts with label Instagram. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Instagram. Show all posts
Instagram Introduces Facebook-Inspired Web Profiles
Instagram has a new Facebook-like vibe.
The photo-sharing site unveiled web profiles this week — a bid to enable users to display both their profile and photos they have taken with the Facebook-owned Smartphone application.
“We’re launching web profiles to give you a simple way to share your photos with more people and to make it easier to discover new users on the web,” the company said in a blog post. “You can share your own profile with anyone you want to see your Instagram photos. In addition, web profiles provide an easy way to follow other users, comment and like photos, and even edit your profile directly from the Web.”
With a web profile, a user’s recently shared photographs will be featured just above his or her profile photo and bio, giving others a “snapshot” of the photos he or she has shared on Instagram, the blog said.
While the design is similar to that of Facebook’s timeline, it has its own personality with a montage of large-scale photos arranged across the top portion of the screen. The images change as users add new pictures and images.
“You can follow users, comment and like photos and edit your profile easily and directly from the web,” the post reads. “It’s a beautiful new way to share your Instagram photos.”
Before launching this new feature, users were able to access Instagram photos online solely through a basic landing page displaying a photo and the comments it had received.
The firm will roll out the new web profiles over the course of this week.
Once up and running, users can access their page through Instagram.com/their username.
The popularity of Instagram has skyrocketed since Facebook announced in April its plans to purchase the site. The purchase became official this fall.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said Instagram had 30 million users at the time of the announcement. In a little more than six months that number had climbed to 100 million, he said.
The social media giant shelled out $715 million in cash and shares to purchase the photo-sharing site, according to the quarterly investment report it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Oct. 23.
Post from: SiteProNews
The photo-sharing site unveiled web profiles this week — a bid to enable users to display both their profile and photos they have taken with the Facebook-owned Smartphone application.
“We’re launching web profiles to give you a simple way to share your photos with more people and to make it easier to discover new users on the web,” the company said in a blog post. “You can share your own profile with anyone you want to see your Instagram photos. In addition, web profiles provide an easy way to follow other users, comment and like photos, and even edit your profile directly from the Web.”
With a web profile, a user’s recently shared photographs will be featured just above his or her profile photo and bio, giving others a “snapshot” of the photos he or she has shared on Instagram, the blog said.
While the design is similar to that of Facebook’s timeline, it has its own personality with a montage of large-scale photos arranged across the top portion of the screen. The images change as users add new pictures and images.
“You can follow users, comment and like photos and edit your profile easily and directly from the web,” the post reads. “It’s a beautiful new way to share your Instagram photos.”
Before launching this new feature, users were able to access Instagram photos online solely through a basic landing page displaying a photo and the comments it had received.
The firm will roll out the new web profiles over the course of this week.
Once up and running, users can access their page through Instagram.com/their username.
The popularity of Instagram has skyrocketed since Facebook announced in April its plans to purchase the site. The purchase became official this fall.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said Instagram had 30 million users at the time of the announcement. In a little more than six months that number had climbed to 100 million, he said.
The social media giant shelled out $715 million in cash and shares to purchase the photo-sharing site, according to the quarterly investment report it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Oct. 23.
Post from: SiteProNews
What is Instagram
At first glance, I thought, here's another photo social network that does nothing that Flickr can't do, except excite the Technorati because it was created by someone who worked at Twitter and Google. After playing with Instagram for a while, though, I could start to see the addiction for it that's clearly affecting a lot of its users (the majority of whom appear to be teenaged girls, by the way). The Flickr iPhone app, it's true, lacks Instagram's photo-blinging effects, and though you can get a better selection of these from other iPhone apps like iBooth or Camera+, Instagram brings them to social photo sharing, making applying them a snap.
Tumblr offers a similar social photo experience, and I can see why Instagram is similarly alluring. In both, you see a picture you like, you can view the list of everyone else who liked it, view their photos, and those of anyone on those users' contact lists. Tumblr does come with a far larger audience, though, and the Tumblr app exceeds Instagram's capabilities by not only letting you upload photos, but video, audio, text, and links, in a better-designed interface. The Instagram team pumps out new versions regularly, so we may see it catch up to Tumblr.
Other services like Tumbler and CloudTalk do offer more posting options, but Instagram's restriction to just photos could be in its favor. Instagram has major advantages over Path and Color, too, apps that might seem to compete with it. But the former only lets you see and share images from contacts, and the latter…well, Color was popular the week it came out, but good luck finding anyone running it now.
We can't ignore the elephant in the room: Facebook is rumored to be launching a publicphoto sharing app, which could effectively put the kibosh on any small players, no matter how much cachet they have with tech insiders. Even now, the Facebook iPhone app does a decent job with photos, but that's just for seeing your Friends' photos; there's no discovery of other people out in the great world sharing images.
And we mustn't forget the other social network that matters, either. Twitter just announced it would be adding its own photo feature hosted by Photobucket.
So the world of mobile photo sharing is due for a shake out. There are just too many players at the moment. While Instagram is having a shining moment, it's unlikely to unseat major players like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Flickr. But for now, in its moment in the sun, Instagram is certainly worth your rooting around in its contents. If you want larger audiences for your photos without the effect gimmickry, stick with Flickr and Tumblr's iPhone apps, or check out the new arrivals from Twitter and Facebook.
More than a few pundits noted the similarity of Apple's announced iCloud feature they're calling Photo Stream to an app that's been around over a half a year and is gaining in popularity—Instagram. But Instagram differs in important ways from its iCloud imitator (we think): It lets you bling your iPhone photos and flaunt them to a public social network. The Flickr (Free, 4 stars) and Tumblr (Free, 3 stars) iPhone apps also let you take and upload photos to a stream that can be public, others can subscribe to your feed, and can comment on and like your pictures. CloudTalk (Free, 3.5 stars) goes beyond these adding voice messages. But Instagram's focus on photos can be seen as a plus, and the app really can get addictive, once you start hopping around among users' uploads.
Signup and Setup
To do anything but browse popular photos, you'll need to create an Instagram account. I'm not sure why the app's creators didn't just let you sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account, as more and more services are doing. To get going, you need to enter an email address, user name, and optionally a phone number and photo. You're then encouraged to find friends on the service in your contact list, Facebook, and Twitter. You can also just search for those you know.
To do anything but browse popular photos, you'll need to create an Instagram account. I'm not sure why the app's creators didn't just let you sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account, as more and more services are doing. To get going, you need to enter an email address, user name, and optionally a phone number and photo. You're then encouraged to find friends on the service in your contact list, Facebook, and Twitter. You can also just search for those you know.
I found that quite a few of the fad-following technorati I follow on Twitter had accounts already. In a twitter-like setup (Instagram's founder and CEO came from Twitter) you click a button to "follow" other users. After finding and choosing folks to follow, the app suggested celebrities and the like for me to add—Rosie O'Donnell, Foo Fighters, and NPR were presented for my consideration. Each of these showed four rotating image thumbnails, in a pleasant UI touch.
The app then popped up a notification telling me it wanted to send me Push Notifications. That sounds unnecessarily intrusive for a nonessential service. Do I really want a notification to stop whatever I'm doing because someone uploaded another picture of his brat? Luckily, that's not the case with these notifications: They're just for when someone "Likes" or comments on one of your pictures. But still, many may prefer not to add another source of interruptions.
Interface
Once you snap a photo or choose one from your iPhone's camera roll, a scrollable gallery of effects appears along the bottom of the screen—things like lomo, sepia, along with some cleverly named options—nothing I'd ever apply to a photo I wanted to look its best. But there are a couple useful and interesting options, you can move and scale your photo so it fits well in the mandatory square used by Instagram, and a tilt-shift effect is interesting, letting you change a photo's perspective. This actually does more toward creating a bokeheffect, blurring part of your photo.
Once you snap a photo or choose one from your iPhone's camera roll, a scrollable gallery of effects appears along the bottom of the screen—things like lomo, sepia, along with some cleverly named options—nothing I'd ever apply to a photo I wanted to look its best. But there are a couple useful and interesting options, you can move and scale your photo so it fits well in the mandatory square used by Instagram, and a tilt-shift effect is interesting, letting you change a photo's perspective. This actually does more toward creating a bokeheffect, blurring part of your photo.
After you've tweaked the image to your taste, you decide how and where to share. You get a choice of enabling the iPhone's geotag, sharing to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, or Posterous. When your social contact clicks the entry, an Instagram Web page displays the photo and touts the iPhone app, but thankfully viewing doesn't require them to sign up for an account. On either these or the Instagram feed, you can't title or caption a photo as you can in Flickr, but you and anyone who sees it can write a comment or "heart" it. At the top, a time elapsed indicator says when the photo was uploaded, whether 3 seconds ago or 3 hours ago.
In addition to seeing the feed of uploaded photos from your contacts, you can view popular images, or just news about who uploaded or commented. I only wish you could view full size photos instead of being restricted to the partial screen squares, and that you could scroll through a particular user's stream, rather than having to click repeatedly on thumbnails. A twitter-like profile page shows how many users are following you and vice versa. In all, the interface isn't what I'd call slick: no one's going to confuse it for an Apple-created app. But it's clear enough, and apparently is going for a folksy, low-res look.
You can set your photo stream to private, so that only users you approve can see it, but there's no private messaging, as in Kik and CloudTalk. Like Tumblr, though, Instagram isn't about messaging, but rather a stream of socially connected posts. Still, a private messaging option wouldn't hurt. Path, another mobile photo-sharing up-and-comer, has the opposite problem: You can't view photos of anyone you haven't connected with.
Sources: pcmag.com
Instagram Has 100M Users
Instagram, a mobile-only photo-sharing app, had 30 million users at the time of purchase. Tuesday, Zuckerberg said that number has grown to 100 million.
“They are killing it,” he said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
Instagram, which officially became part of the Facebook empire last week, will not be assimilated into the company’s infrastructure, Zuckerberg assured fans of the service.
“Our mission with Instagram is we want to help them grow to hundreds of millions of users,” Zuckerberg was quoted by TechCrunch. “We have no agenda with making them go onto our
infrastructure.”
According to a Business Insider report, “after Facebook, which has 543 million monthly active users on mobile, and Twitter which has 140 million daily active users across all platforms, no social network is close to as big as Instagram is on mobile.”
Pinterest, in recent months, has turned down acquisition offers above $2 billion. If Instagram were still an independent company, the report said, “it would surely be getting better offers than that.”
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