Instagram almost had a perfect year. Almost.
The billion-dollar Facebook acquisition, the Android debut, new Web profiles, overtaking Twitter in daily active users... so what happened? A change to its terms of service ignited a storm of protest, as users feared their photos could be used in advertisements.
With the proliferation of free sites and services, most people are familiar by now with the idea that if you're not paying for it, you are the product. But this was too much, and suddenly the doors swung open for competitor photo services to snare some new users. Remember Yahoo's Flickr? It seemed for a while like even Yahoo forgot about it, but a loyal fan base and a timely app update helped the nearly decade-old image hosting site and community become relevant again this week. Meanwhile, Instagram quickly responded to the uproar, blaming confusing language and denying it ever planned to sell users' photos.
And you may have noticed that the world didn't end yesterday. In a new segment called Content Spotlight, we'll show you some clever brands who worked the Mayan prophesy into videos, infographics and social media campaigns.
It's all in the latest episode of Freshwire's "60 Seconds of Social Media" below.
And watch last week's episode on YouTube's redesign here.