Recently, I blogged about some 3rd party app sites that had been built up around Instagram, my favorite photo sharing app. I fell in love with them as they enhanced my Instagram experience with lots of add on features, that aren’t in the upstart Instagram app. I was able to enjoy spending hours with my new toys. Then the sites went down, some had made changes to legal disclosures and it become obvious Instagram had made a legal move to shut them down. I was bummed out and my suspicions where confirmed after contacting the sites.
With Instagrams app it is very limited, as it is a new company. I wondered if they were going to embrace third party developers and expand like Twitter had or wall off their garden. After seeing MANY users complain about it on Twitter, I took the question to Quora. I was hoping get some insight from their team which had chatted on Quora and the Tweets I put out to them, had not been responded to. My question was: Instagram told 3rd Party developers today to stop using their site data, shutting down Followgram and possibly others. Was this the right move to make for users?
The focus for me was, why are the USERS being punished? Some developers had come up with some incredible add ons to the service?
The beauty of Quora is that I was able to send comment invites to Instagrams CEO to get their side of the story and encourage them to give these developers some rope. After I invited Robert Scoble, Jesse Stay and a few other heavy weights into commenting on the posting, the discussion expanded even quicker.
Whats great about Quora is the ability to invite people into the discussion and really expand its scope and intellectual input. The numbers of people following it kept growing like this on Quora: “This question has been viewed 9745 times and has 1 monitor with 2434 topic followers. 103 people are following this question.” It blew my mind how big just within a small time the interest had grown. You can see the immense interest in the bottom right corner of the attached picture.
In the meantime, it had prompted a discussion behind the scenes on my email with a few 3rd party developers resistant to taking down their sites as Instagram had requested. I encouraged them to chime in and they did. In the end, the CEO of Instagram made a statement and with all the developers voicing their opinions, many of the 3rd party developers made the decision to close their sites, to wait for the coming API from Instagram.
It was amazing how it played out. 3rd party developers were resistant to the legal notices sent out to them. Through the venue of Quora, because of the open discussion, they agreed to shutter their sites. An amazing result, where a DISCUSSION won out over Legal threats. If you click the link below you can read through it.
The quora About page, http://www.quora.com/about, says the site is for questions, and answers, “as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people” — not so much a discussion forum.
Stephan
The answers invoke much discussion on the answers themselves. Have you
spent much time seeing what is going on there?
I was just pointing out what looks like a disconnect to me. — S
This doesn’t sound like huge change. This sounds like technology people having their conversation facilitated on Quora, a platform where that particular niche community hung out. This isn’t so much about Quora being awesome so much as it is about the CEO knowing his market (developers), where they hang out (quora) and taking advantage of that to facilitate communication.
That’s just basic marketing.
Quora is not the only venue for “open discussion”. And this sure as hell isn’t the first time that talking about the problem solved it. In fact, I’m not convinced there was a problem at all, since at the time of writing this comment Instagram has made very deliberate moves to open up their platform to 3rd party developers – what they were doing there was within their legal rights, and that was: revising their T&Cs about user data.
I hate to sound like a troll, but this post demonstrates a clear lack of understanding when it comes to social debate. It’s been happening for years, across hundreds of thousands of sites, and it’s settled millions of disputes. Maybe you haven’t seen all of that yet, but I can guarantee you that this has been going on far longer than Quora has.
This. Seriously.
Would the author be hailing LiveJournal as an incredibly awesome platform that solves many problems by the virtue of the problem being resolved on LiveJournal? I some how doubt it. Who cares about LiveJournal? LiveJournal isn’t new and sexy. LiveJournal isn’t getting a lot of coverage in TechCrunch and Mashable. Quora on the other hand is! And if you tweet about it and your content is in Google’s blog search, you’ll get the traffic.
Will give mad props to the author though for saving lives. (I’d love to see a real case study on that!) I’ll also give mad props to the author for his ability to sell his services… The article though? No mad props.
Chris you keep us informed, and that’s precious, the move toward decentralized or app based social media is a wonderful thing; especially as Facebook is now starting to move to rules based management for their nation. It might be Chris that you’ve once again hit on an insight into a process that might help a company go through the transitional birth without setting themselves up for failure. Hope they’re hailing you as being insightful? -Dana