folks seem to be irked re: the instagram terms of service. i don’t know what they were expecting. it’s free, polished app which requires serious ergs in terms of engineering efforts expended. instagram’s a prodigious consumer of network bandwidth and storage (those pictures aren’t trivial to store at massive scale) and folks haven’t exactly been shouldering the burden for this delivery by opening their wallets.
but seriously, “awful” or as someone couched it, “shameful”? it’s a product which people have been using for free which has proven to be immensely successful. it’s represented a compelling step forward in photo sharing. but providing this service doesn’t come for free and folks are ignorant to think that the free ride will continue indefinitely.
isn’t the awful part that as a society we’ve become accustomed to getting things for free and have developed an innate sense of justification that we’re somehow owed this? if we want control and to have some dialog/input as to how people make money off of us, perhaps we should be willing to open our wallets.