That's the danger that you get when your main product lives of someone else's main product. I'm the author of InstaDesk, an Instagram client for the Mac, and I've also always assumed that this day would come. This will probably affect me too, but not as hard as web.stagram and the like, since I'm offering several "pro" features that will probably never make it to the Instagram website. My next release will allow the users to use "comment reply" templates, see which comments they've already replied to, download images for specific tags, etc, and much more. All more suited to people who use Instagram to connect to huge audiences (people with several thousand followers, etc). In the worst case, I'll need to raise prices to account for a smaller niche market. But let's see, it may also result in more Instagram users since it will be easier now to "experience" the network.

I also hope they finally allow user registration on the web. Currently, users can only register from within the iPhone or Android app, which makes it difficult for people to just register in order to follow a couple of friends.

But yeah, since I've kinda expected this to happen at some point, I've been busy in the past months to work on two separate products, that are slowly nearing completion.

Benedikt - I bought and loved Instadesk many months back (before I got the Nexus 7, which is now my primary Instagram browser). I really hope this doesn't hit you too hard and wish you the best for your other products :-)

That said, I really, really hope they don't allow people to post or register from the web. Spam is bad enough already.

Thanks! InstaDesk still has many features that their current web implementation doesn't have, so in the short term I expect the hit to be marginal, but in the long term it's good that I have other products lined up :)

You're right about the spam, but it always saddens me if somebody buys my app and can't use it due to the lack of an IG account (I'm stating this restriction right in the first sentence of the app description, but some people don't even read that).

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.

From the horses mouth, 1:38:30 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgn2fhZBAVA&feature=fvsr

Definitely didn't say anything about not having an API going forward.

It's an incredibly obvious direction for Instagram to expand in so I'd hope they had some plan for this

Rake in as much cash as possible from their ads whilst Instagram aren't doing it and then wind it down?

I can't see what other benefit they'd bring over the official site (except as another post noted, RSS feeds).

Exactly - it's like the Twitter developer relationship, where you just have to assume that they're going to coopt your business at any time if all you're doing is repurposing their API.