Iconosquare (formerly statigram) is now IconoSUCKS
*Update May 14, 2016: Once again, iconosquare gonna try to revamp their service again because on June 1st, 2016 all free service go away for good and everything I’ve said below will most likely become relevant again.
*Update May 2, 2015 : Since the fierce backlash from users from all over, iconosquare has felt the heat and put out the fire by rolling their site back to the way it used to be! Good decision on their part (though it kinda makes this article a bit irrelevant) Still, if that’s the price to pay, I’d rather that than the $200/month they were initially trying to charge for their service ;)
Today the one 3rd party instagram web-viewer I used to manage my accounts has turned a new leaf and undergone a complete overhaul to their services and interface. Iconosquare (formerly statigram, formerly awesome) was really good until now. This is unfortunate because I had just mentioned them in a recent article and kinda feel a bit embarrassed in recommending them now. I’d feel worse if I told you guys to go eat somewhere and then find out in an article the next day that they are under current investigations by food inspectors.
One of the fun aspects of their site is that they had before was seeing various statistics, such as the best times of day to post based on your community’s activity, new/lost followers, and the percentage of active users on your stream.
What I liked about it the most is the ability to sit at my laptop and be able to reply and comment easily using their interface instead of having to type on my phone which was always tedious (even with a bluetooth keyboard). Now it’s no better than using instagram’s web-interface. At least their emojis work now.. :|
Before:
After:
It’s not so much of the crazy fees they’re asking to use their premium service (as I would’ve been happy to just be a free user without all the bells and whistles), it’s really the massive change to the interface. Think of coming home after a long day to find that your toilet is now in your kitchen. Although somewhat practical in some aspects, it just not right.. So now it’s gone from a nice dark background with a large grid to view more images at once to a white background (which to me is a bit hard on the eyes after a while) and a smaller grid that you have to re-load every time you want to go past a certain point (and back again).
It’s gone from this:
To this:
Though it may seem cleaner upon first glance, the moment you start to use it, it gets frustrating to say the least.
Another bummer was that I used their site to bookmark links to users that didn’t post as frequently whom I’d like to visit every now and then but now since the site change, the links are totally invalid. Remember those times back in the day where your contacts weren’t stored on the cloud and if you lost your phone, you lost your contacts? This.
Far be it for me to complain about any free service out there, as you get what you pay for, but you know, 1st world problems and all ;)
I mean they still had advertisements on the old model which is the bane of any free app/site, etc so they could’ve kept things the same and gave the new site to the paying users (but I’m no site expert so what do I know). It’s just too bad I guess. This was one tool that really helped in trying to keep contact and manage interactions on the instagram application. Now it’s gone (sort of). *insert virtual 2 year old tantrum here.
Personally, I’ve found websta to be the next best thing so but if any of you out there have some suggestions to any other awesome web-browser viewers, just let me know!