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Spoiler: They all died.
TLDR: The commandment of control is real and I get to join the group that learned this the hard way.
About two years ago we started developing (in our free time) a service that prints Instagram photos with a simple #hashtag. This way, a user could print photos without ever exiting the Instagram application. Over the course of the last two years, we developed a fully working application; all custom coded. picturestork.com was born.
Yesterday, PictureStork died.
This happened as a result of not following the commandment of control.
Instagram made a change that will be effective in their 2020 API. This change makes it so that a user must connect their account to our service, but that connection dies after an hour. Currently, the connection lives forever and allows us to pull their data nightly to print the proper hash-tagged photos. This actually will be killing lots of businesses. There are many developers online complaining about these user access tokens expiring after an hour as it renders their applications useless:
Renewing User Access Token using Instagram Basic Display
It's important to note, throughout the two years, we invested heavily in time and money to make PictureStork a thing. Not to mention all of the hurdles we had to overcome at every single step of the way. Many of the hurdles were caused by Instagram and should have been seen as huge warning flags. It's so easy to be blinded, tunnel visioned, and keep going though. It's also easy to see the end in the future, but not want that time to be wasted, so you keep investing more and doubling down when you should have stopped long ago.
I'm actually not too sad.. Not as sad as I should be maybe. I learned a ton and I'm ready to push forward on something new without violating this commandment xD.
Just thought I'd share. Off to message our users their service will be gone the end of the year and that they better print their photos out!
TLDR: The commandment of control is real and I get to join the group that learned this the hard way.
About two years ago we started developing (in our free time) a service that prints Instagram photos with a simple #hashtag. This way, a user could print photos without ever exiting the Instagram application. Over the course of the last two years, we developed a fully working application; all custom coded. picturestork.com was born.
Yesterday, PictureStork died.
This happened as a result of not following the commandment of control.
Instagram made a change that will be effective in their 2020 API. This change makes it so that a user must connect their account to our service, but that connection dies after an hour. Currently, the connection lives forever and allows us to pull their data nightly to print the proper hash-tagged photos. This actually will be killing lots of businesses. There are many developers online complaining about these user access tokens expiring after an hour as it renders their applications useless:
Renewing User Access Token using Instagram Basic Display
It's important to note, throughout the two years, we invested heavily in time and money to make PictureStork a thing. Not to mention all of the hurdles we had to overcome at every single step of the way. Many of the hurdles were caused by Instagram and should have been seen as huge warning flags. It's so easy to be blinded, tunnel visioned, and keep going though. It's also easy to see the end in the future, but not want that time to be wasted, so you keep investing more and doubling down when you should have stopped long ago.
I'm actually not too sad.. Not as sad as I should be maybe. I learned a ton and I'm ready to push forward on something new without violating this commandment xD.
Just thought I'd share. Off to message our users their service will be gone the end of the year and that they better print their photos out!
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