Читать книгу Instagram - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 14

In late 2015 Instagram announced changes to their Application Program Interface, or API, which is essentially the software and rules which allow other platforms and apps to access the Instagram platform. The rule changes, which were staggered and many were actually enforced from 1 June 2016, meant that third-party Instagram readers (such as Padgram) and web-based Instagram clients (such as Webstagram) essentially could no longer operate. Instagram’s altered and tightened APIs, and related policies, were ostensibly to better ensure the quality of third-party apps, but also came at a time when Instagram itself was beginning to undergo significant change and internal consolidation (Constine 2015). While the API changes did not have the same impact as they did when Twitter made the first dramatic changes to their API (Bohn 2012), it nevertheless demonstrated a significant shift in the way Instagram interacted with other developers who utilized the Instagram platform in any capacity. Instagram’s API changes essentially ended an early phase where third-party applications had almost free reign, to a more controlled ecology where Instagram were far more careful and selective about who could access Instagram data and what could be done with it.

It is no coincidence that Instagram’s API changes came in the midst of the platform releasing several standalone apps of its own. In August 2014, Instagram quietly released the Hyperlapse app for Apple devices, which allowed users to speed up, smooth and stabilize video footage to create appealing, condensed videos of longer periods of activity. In March 2015, another Instagram app, Layout, was added, which allowed users to create image collages of various forms and post these directly to Instagram. Layout was particularly notable in that it replicated the functionality present in many of the third-party Instagram apps, showing that Facebook was all too happy to pick and choose some of the most popular elements of Instagram’s ecology of third-party apps. The third Instagram-related app, Boomerang, was released in October the same year; it allowed the capture of two-second long looped videos, in aesthetically similar territory to animated GIFs (Miltner & Highfield 2017), but as video rather than image files. The emergence of Instagram’s own suite of apps, and the changes forced onto all third-party apps accessing Instagram’s data, is explored in more detail in chapter 3. Of course, the most turbulent relationship between Instagram and another platform is the ongoing turf war with Snapchat, which is explored below in relation to the emergence of Stories.