Felt 'signal to noise' ratio was now too low

Curiosity has lead a Mac user to one of the unique "moments" that continue to make Apple a special company: in this case, blogger Clayton Braasch wondered if there might be other reasons why Phil Schiller tweeted that he was quitting Instagram, so he simply wrote to Apple's VP of Worldwide Marketing. Schiller responded personally, and expanded on the reasoning behind his initial tweet, in which he claimed the service had "jumped the shark."

In his initial tweet, Schiller replied to someone who had noticed he had deleted his Instagram account and asked why. Schiller wrote back that it "jumped the shark when it went to Android."

When Braasch asked for clarification, he got a longer reply from Schiller, who still praised Instagram as a "great app and community." He added that while "that hasn't changed," one of the things he really liked about Instagram was "that it was a small community of early adopters sharing their photographs."

Schiller said that the community has now "grown much larger, the signal to noise ratio is different," which may be as much due to Facebook's acquisition of Instagram as the number of new members that have joined because the app finally made it to Android.

The latter move attracted a great inrush of people who had previously been unable to use it. Referring to the growth, he added "that isn't necessarily good or bad, it's just not what I originally had fun with."

The reply paints his earlier tweet as more humorous than may have initially come across, taking an expected position of an Apple loyalist. It is also possible that he simply reconsidered the more flippant first answer, though he probably did not know his reply to Braasch would be published as well. [via Clayton Braasch]

by MacNN Staff