I saw Kevin Systrom speak at Pando Monthly and he was asked this question in the QA, how they were doing to deal with developers and whether they'd be like Twitter (to which everybody laughed, but the question asker didn't expand).
Systrom said that they very much wanted people to do things that they themselves don't plan to do. He gave the example of a company printing photos to t-shirts. He left it mostly unstated but it was strongly implied that where their product goals are the same as what people are developing with their API, they'll have no reservations competing with people - or even forcing them to stop doing things.
So ya - if you want to be an Instagram developer it would seem the correct strategic path would be to do things they aren't doing and will probably never be interested in doing.
Kudos to Facebook for not falling victim to the innovators dilemma, and allowing Instagram to develop into a service that could very well end up killing what we know as Facebook today.
Thanks for the info. It is good to know that they're not considering turning off the API or limiting it. There's very little information on the official channels about this.
Systrom said that they very much wanted people to do things that they themselves don't plan to do. He gave the example of a company printing photos to t-shirts. He left it mostly unstated but it was strongly implied that where their product goals are the same as what people are developing with their API, they'll have no reservations competing with people - or even forcing them to stop doing things.
So ya - if you want to be an Instagram developer it would seem the correct strategic path would be to do things they aren't doing and will probably never be interested in doing.
Kudos to Facebook for not falling victim to the innovators dilemma, and allowing Instagram to develop into a service that could very well end up killing what we know as Facebook today.