An Example of How Quora Discussions Can Be Used to Effect Huge Change

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.

My Quora Discussion