Yesterday, there was a lot of activity on twitter related to the Instagram new terms of services (TOS). Instragram plans to productize the millions of user generated content which happens to be the beautiful photographs created by its free users of the service. Users are strongly protesting the change in TOS and plan to discontinue use of the Instagram service. Instagram built up its subscriber base by offering a great product packaged with a free service to lure in professional photographers and content publishers to share content through its service. After the acquisition by Facebook, there is tremendous pressure to monetize the content to drive revenues. The crux of the problem is on ownership of the content. The content producers are against using their user generated content. This debate raises an interesting question on user content leveraging free services like Instagram, Flikr and drop box to share and collaborate. It is an important question that needs to be answered for the future of the web based on social media. At the end of the day, social media companies need to monetize and will use the user generated content for selling adds, analyzing patterns and selling data to 3rd party companies. As a consumer of such services, we need to take a call on adopting such freemium services vs the cost of our privacy. The updated TOS by Instagram may open the door for competitors like Flickr who are pro consumer in terms of the service agreement on content use.
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