I won’t be closing mine, I like the community I’ve found there.. unless everyone else leaves and then its no fun, then I might consider stopping.
I hashtag so people can see them, so if it was used anywhere, I wouldn’t mind, but I think it is important for everyone to understand the terms and conditions for anything they sign up to, and fully agree to them!

Regards
Agrodut Mandal
Academic Assignment

But for now I’ll just say that your post here prompted me to quickly login to Instagram yesterday and delete that account. Until I got an email from them recently, I didn’t even realise I had an account. AFAIK, I never used it: I’m not much of a photographer, I have mixed feelings about the explosion of mobile photo-sharing, and it didn’t offer any function of value to me, and that recent rights spat certainly did nothing to encourage me. In the event that you catch me at some point in the future muttering ruefully into my beer, “Aww, man, I WISH I had an Instagram account”, you are free to say “I told you so!”, but I have to say it seems very unlikely.

A few weeks ago I also deleted an old, little-used Flickr account too – I should add that my experience of Flickr as a service was mostly a positive one. (I occasionally wonder whether the relatively low rate of feature change contributed to my positive opinion!) But I haven’t made active use of it for a long time (four years since I uploaded anything, IIRC), and it had become just another thing requiring low-level maintenance. And there is labour required simply in maintaining these accounts, even if it is just at the level of updating settings as features change, or occasionally responding to messages, or blocking spammers.

I admit I chuckled at your footnote argument that one must surely hasten to sign up for new services in order to “reserve” one’s preferred userid! Oh crumbs… I understand the userid-as-cross-service-personal-brand thing, but surely the proliferation of services made that a Sisyphean task several years ago?

P.S. I discovered your post when it appeared in my RSS Reader yesterday. Old school :)

Thanks for the comment.

In a talk on Managing Your Digital Profile I suggested that you can’t ignore Google even if you didn’t want to use Google+ as a social net6work (see slide 36). In a comment above Steve Ellwood alerted me to a post on Google Plus is a Social Backplane Service which describes ho hew:

“give[s] you what you need to start figuring out the business applications of this platform as it stands right now. That’d be a great leg up on where this all goes next.”

and concludes wrt the numbers of G+:

“Don’t reply with “no one’s there.” You don’t buy a fridge and find it full of food. Millions and millions of people are there. You’re just not doing the work. If 500 million have an account and reports estimate about 250 million people are fairly darned active, that’s more people than Twitter. You’re just not following them yet.”

The question of information overload on social networks is one I didn’t address in the post. On Twitter, as you, this can be addressed by a combination of tools (lists, filtering, etc.) but more importantly by personal approaches to use of the tool: it’s a stream and you don’t have to read every tweet or respond to everyone that mentions you and you don’t need to use Twitter in bed or on holiday if you don’t want to.

But the question of email overload is a newer one, following Twitter’s posting of email summaries and LinkedIn sending email notifications of activities in your LinkedIn communities including details of your endorsements. However these alerts can be disabled as described in a LinkedIn FAQ for the question How do I add, stop, or change the frequency of email notifications? :-)

Which isn’t to say that your concerns about the “digital clutter” you encounter aren’t a real concern. My point is that deleting one’s account means deleting one’s network as well as the content and rebuilding on’es network may be time-consuming than using tools (or approaches) to help with filtering content.

Which of the revised terms and conditions concerns you? Is it:

“Some of the Service is supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions, and you hereby agree that Instagram may place such advertising and promotions on the Service or on, about, or in conjunction with your Content. The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you.”

I personally don’t mind ads being served when people view content I publish on a free service. note that this is the cases with posts on the WordPress.com blogs so if you object to this clause I assume you’d argue that people should use the free version of WordPress.com? (If you subscribe to WordPress.com adverts aren’t displayed).

Ta

Brian

As I alluded, following Tantek Çelik’s idea, I’m trying to produce content where I control/keep it – and when I don’t, use tools like http://thinkupapp.com/ to capture it.

I already use delicious in its latest guise to snatch links from Facebook and Twitter e.g. https://delicious.com/shaidorsai/from%20twitter for reference purposes.

I tend to agree that the “oooh you’re the product” screamers can get a bit tiresome. I guess I’ll stop using the products when their utility is outweighed by their irritation.

In passing, did you see http://www.chrisbrogan.com/social-backplane/ ? G+ being sneaked into use across their other property?

One question I would ask about your migration to Flickr is what would you do if the terms and conditions of Flickr changed or the service changed ownership. We saw how Yahoo were forced to sell delicious last year and since Yahoo’s financial position does not appear too healthy, the sustainability of their service may be questionable.

Note I’m basing my comments on a recent Techcrunch article in which the author commented:

For some of us, we’ve moved on to other photo hosting and sharing services, and companies like Facebook and Google have taken a major bite out of Flickr’s powerful photographic stronghold. I’ve personally let my Flickr Pro account lapse, because there just wasn’t enough value in continuing to go back to it.

together with the Quantcast display of US traffic to the site.

I agree with you that, for me, not using Instagram in order to stop them from making money from one’s photo isn’t an issue. Ironically as there is a CC-BY licence for this blog, anyone is entitled to monetise the content of this blog!

I saw the furore, and decided the terms as they then were were unacceptable.
I deleted (all 6 of ) my images, stuck ‘em back in Flickr.

I would have thought much harder if it was FB.
I tend to pick up profiles on most services, but really use few. Mostly Twitter/FB, with some politics on Tumblr…

I can’t see me moving off FB – too many family/friends who wouldn’t go to diaspora, for example.

Steve

I had thought briefly about leaving Instagram, but then realised that it was only my own vanity that thought anyone/company might use a picture of mine and make a fortune, and the ease of sharing with pictures from was still pretty attractive. However it may have spurred my decision to finally sign up to blipfoto and do the picture a day challenge. As for google+, facebook etc I’m willing to stick with them just now – the advantages outweigh disadvantages just now and tbh I don’t think any great loss to me or society if I couldn’t access them.

Sheila

Yes.