Kevin Systrom of Instagram infamy, again (emphasis his, actually):

Because of the feedback we have heard from you, we are reverting this advertising section to the original version that has been in effect since we launched the service in October 2010.

Yayhooray! No ads! Unless…

Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work.

Whoa whoa whoa. I had to read that sentencegraph a few times over because at first blush it’s too grammatically hilarious to tell whether or not it’s patronizing. Turns out it is.

Let’s start with Systrom’s fantasy that Instagram tried to “obtain permission” from us to introduce “possible advertising products.” In my mind, asking permission usually constitutes asking someone for permission to do something, not slipping out a legal document one afternoon that millions would passively agree to if no one had, you know, read it. And that possible advertising product sounded pretty damn actual on paper.

So then: rather than doing something Instagram didn’t actually do, what does Systrom propose? Why, they’re going to take time to work on their “plans” and then explain it to the users when they’re ready. Here’s the thing, Kevin, you already did that and everyone hated it.

My Instagram account is still up but I’ll be deleting it once I know all my pictures and metadata are in order after the holidays.

I just renewed my Flickr Pro account and I have to say there isn’t much I miss about Instagram, not even the people as it seems my small photographic network has made the jump as well. And, you know, I pay them so they don’t clutter up my feed with ads. Win-win, it seems.

Systrom and Instagram (and social overlord Facebook) are on damage control this week, but make no mistake about this latest blog post: there is nothing that will stop Instagram from becoming the cluttered ad network users roared over this week. They’ve got investors’ mouths to feed, after all. I say get out now, while you still can.

By the way: here I am being a pro back in 2007. I honestly didn’t think I’d be back on Flickr in 2012, but here we are.

Peter Kafka reporting for All Things D on a bill that would allow Netflix users’ to automatically post their viewing habits to social media:

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that would give the video service the go-ahead to facilitate “frictionless sharing” of users’ viewing history with Facebook or other online services.

Music services like Rdio and Spotify currently offer sharing like this, but Netflix can’t make the leap in the U.S. because of the Video Privacy Protection Act from 1988.

The only reason that bill ever made it into law was because Congress was scared shitless after a reporter at a D.C. alt-weekly got ahold of the rental history of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who passed away earlier this week.

Speaking of ads on Facebook and its subsidiaries, looks like big FB is prepping video ads for your news feed. There’s more:

In what’s sure to be a controversial move, the visual component of the Facebook video ads will start playing automatically – a dynamic known as “autoplay” – according to two of the executives. Facebook is still debating whether to have the audio component of the ads activated automatically as well, one of these people said.

Thus dashing my dream that autoplay would join <blink> in the trash heap of markup history.

Instagram’s new Terms of Use went live yesterday (they take effect January 16th) and, well, everyone is up in arms. Nilay Patel has a great piece over at The Verge¹ on what the terms do and don’t mean.

Though everyone’s talking about the paragraph on how they plan to use users’ photos to generate ad revenue, I’m more interested in the lines that precede it. Let me break it up (emphasis mine):

Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service.

Hooray!

Instead…

Instead?

Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, except that you can control who can view certain of your Content and activities on the Service as described in the Service’s Privacy Policy, available here: http://instagram.com/legal/privacy/.

All that worldwide, sub-licensable, royalty-free mumbo-jumbo is pretty common.² It means that you give the company license to use your work on their service.

What is weird about Instagram’s terms, though, is that it doesn’t make clear what the limits of this license are as some other companies do.

Here are Apple’s iCloud Terms of Service, which includes use of Photo Stream:

Except for material we may license to you, Apple does not claim ownership of the materials and/or Content you submit or make available on the Service.

Hooray again?

However…

Whatever.

However, by submitting or posting such Content on areas of the Service that are accessible by the public or other users with whom you consent to share such Content, you grant Apple a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available, without any compensation or obligation to you.

By my armchair reading, this stipulation gives users a bit of a cudgel should Apple suddenly decide it wants to get (deeper) into the ad business. Apple only has the right to do with your photos whatever you ask it to.

Yahoo!, which owns Flickr, takes a similar tone:

With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo! Services other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Yahoo! Services solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available.

Plus Flickr makes it simple for you to set a license on your photos.

Google, whose Picasa is basically a Google+ front-end nowadays, injects plain english into their terms:

You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

Then the same ol’ royalty-free gobbledygook for a few lines before this:

This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps).

When you’re a jet, you’re a jet all the way.³

By contrast Apple and Yahoo! explicitly state the license is terminated once you remove your photos from the service. Instagram? It’s less clear to me:

If we terminate your access to the Service or you use the form detailed above to deactivate your account, your photos, comments, likes, friendships, and all other data will no longer be accessible through your account (e.g., users will not be able to navigate to your username and view your photos), but those materials and data may persist and appear within the Service (e.g., if your Content has been reshared by others).

Followed immediately by:

Upon termination, all licenses and other rights granted to you in these Terms of Use will immediately cease.

Licenses granted to you. I’m no lawyer, but it sounds like that license you granted to Instagram stays put even after you delete your account.

That is, unless you delete your account before January 16, 2013. That’s exactly what I plan to do once I get all of my photos off of the service. I’ve already downloaded my photos through Instaport,⁴ but that service doesn’t pull down your caption or metadata. I don’t know if Instagram’s API even allows for full metadata extraction, but I’m on the prowl for a tool that gives me a more complete version of my files.

I don’t begrudge Instagram their efforts to monetize their service, nor Facebook’s attempt to get a bit of money back on their billion dollar investment.⁵ That doesn’t mean I need to be a part of it though.

And so I’m moving to Flickr. Their new iOS app is slick and has renewed interest in the social photo-sharing service. I’ve been an on-again-off-again Pro user for years. Soon I’ll start tinkering again on what was once one of my favorite online communities. Perhaps it will be again.

I don’t know what Instagram under the new terms will be like. Maybe I’m being irrational, but I don’t think so. The truth is I don’t want to have to worry about whether my photos will be used to sell products. That is unless I’m getting a cut.

So if you want to check out my pics, I’ll be over on Flickr, snapping away.

Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s co-founder,¹ doing a little damage control on the company blog:

To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos.

That is clear.

To provide context, we envision a future where both users and brands alike may promote their photos & accounts to increase engagement and to build a more meaningful following.

That’s not. See ya.

My thanks to the New York Film Academy for sponsoring the candler blog this week.

Anyone who thinks digital games are for kids is missing out on just how popular gaming has become. A full 40 percent of the total U.S. population plays one or more digital game at least once a month, which has turned it into a multibillion-dollar juggernaut.

Of course, there are those very avid players who play, on average, 18 hours per week on a digital game console, a personal computer or handheld device such as a smart phone or tablet. It is largely from this subset come the game developers of tomorrow, those attending the Game Design School at the New York Film Academy.

Game designers are not necessarily computer programmers, although some attend the academy with that in their backgrounds. Students tend to be enthusiastic gamers, the kinds of people who enjoy the play and have their own ideas of games they would like to develop. Beyond the genre of World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Runes of Magic and EverQuest II, “serious games” are a growing part of educational and business training.

I have no idea what strikes a note with sitting Senators and representatives. But I know what I feel. Here’s what I sent to my representatives in Washington. Be my guest to copy this template.

Dear ___________,

I am writing you to ask that you take the necessary steps to end gun violence in the United States.

I am haunted by the imagery and the stories coming out of Newtown, Connecticut. This massacre is a moment of national mourning. But it also points to a grave national failing. We, collectively, failed the students at Sandy Hook Elementary. It is time to end the ongoing violence in this country. Only elected officials like yourself, ___________, can right this injustice.

I was in junior high school when the shootings at Columbine High School took place. That event rocked the nation and forced children, like myself at the time, to confront the very real dangers of the world. The similarities between Columbine and the school I attended growing up in Pennsylvania were daunting. If it could happen there, it could happen anywhere.

[Sir or Madam], that was over thirteen years ago. Nothing has changed.

I can no longer abide this destruction, this bloodbath being perpetrated on American soil. I put it to you, ___________, and your colleagues in Washington to save us from ourselves; to protect us from the killing machines that have taken too many lives in this country this year alone.

The time for complacency is over. The time for feints and denialism and bickering has passed. You must act now to make it more difficult for anyone to get a gun. You must act to limit the firepower available on the market. You must end the illegal gun trade that goes on in the US and regulate the legal sale of weapons so that killers cannot perpetrate these mass shootings anymore.

As a child I thought that there could never be an event more tragic than Columbine. How many more times must I be proven wrong? How many lives will it take before congress stands up and demands that something be done to stop this senseless violence.

I beg of you to effect change, ___________. I ask you to save the lives of countless Americans with your vote. End gun violence now.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Poritsky

Alfred, an app I’ve used every day for years, is getting a big update in the coming months. Andrew Pepperrell, Alfred’s developer, just revealed a huge new feature coming to the application-launcher-but-so-so-much-more called “Workflows.”

It sounds similar to Automator workflows but built right into the Alfred’s friendly and simple search bar. Here’s the example that (obviously) caught my eye:

Should I watch this movie?

Movies weren’t created equal, so before I start watching a movie, I can search for “movie dark knight rises” to decide whether or not I should watch it. This will launch a YouTube search for the trailer in Chrome (because I don’t have Flash installed in Safari), an IMDB search using a default web search, and a Rotten Tomatoes custom search I’ve created.

That appears to be one of the simpler examples, but it gives a nice idea of what this thing will be capable of.

If you buy the Alfred Power Pack, which unleashes a slew of nerdy features like AppleScript and Shell access, for £15 ($24.21)¹ today you’ll get a free upgrade to v2 when it’s released next year.

As an added incentive, Andrew is offering purchasers of the Mega Supporter license early beta access to v2 in January. For £30 ($48.38) you also get lifetime updates to the app, so when v3 drops in 2016 you’ll be all set.

(via Stephen Hackett.)

By now I assume most readers have heard of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Just after 9:30am today an adult gunman opened fire throughout the school. As of this writing, 27 are reported dead, 18 of them children.

The incident has clogged all of my social feeds, with people, myself included, offering condolences, prayers, opinions, ruminations and the like. Beneath all of it, though, is a sort of backlash against those who bring up politics. Either it’s too soon or too opportunistic or too ghoulish to talk about such things at this juncture.¹

Fuck that.

Wake up.

Americans are being slaughtered. Coast to coast. Regardless of age, race, religion. At schools, movie theaters, houses of worship and on city streets. We have, to put it mildly, a big problem.

So let’s figure it out.

The most important thing for us to do today, as a nation, is to recognize that we have a problem, that there have been a string of senseless murders that have made 2012 a depressingly bloody year. And recognizing that we can and must do something to prevent them.

That’s not being political. That’s being an adult.

Amazon:¹

Videos you’ve purchased or rented with Amazon Instant Video will show up instantly on your Apple device once you download and sign into the app.

As a consumer this is welcome news.

As a media commentator I have no idea how Amazon makes money on this stuff. I always thought their content libraries acted as a Trojan horse to lock you into their ecosystem so you would buy more devices (a la iTunes and Apple). But if you can get an equivalent (superior?) experience on Apple’s devices, why buy a Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (blah blah blah) at all?

Which brings me back around to talk in my consumer voice. If Amazon is practically giving this content away even if I don’t buy their devices, will my TV shows in the cloud still be around in the future?² It’s moves like this (immediately convenient but confusing over the long term) that make me want to back myself out of Amazon’s content library. It just feels unsustainable, which ain’t great since they hold onto my digital wares in perpetuity.