Instagram Removing the Ability for Twitter Users to Embed Photos

  • Instagram announced that it has removed support for Twitter’s expanded tweets or “Twitter cards” because the features pull users away from its own service.
  • “This is an evolution of just where we are and where we want links from our content to go,” says Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom. “This is not a consequence of us getting acquired [by Facebook]. This is a consequence of us doing the best thing for our business at this time.”
  • The expanded tweets show excerpts from blog posts, online newspapers or in the case of Instagram, full photos.
  • “Instagram at some point clearly decided that doing this transferred too much of the value of its content to Twitter instead of allowing it to capture that value itself,” reports GigaOM. “Other media companies should probably also be asking themselves similar questions about their relationship with Twitter.”
  • The article notes the complicated relationship between the two platforms; Instagram was acquired by Facebook for an estimated $1 billion, while Twitter reportedly tried to acquire the photo-sharing service before Facebook.
  • Twitter is working to become a media entity, “rather than just a dumb pipe for distributing other people’s content,” GigaOM notes. As a result, the platform has a “desire to control and monetize as much of its platform as possible, and as much of the content that flows through it.”
  • Although having links and content show up on Twitter is undoubtedly good for content creators who are trying to expand their audience, Instagram “loses more value than it gains from the expanded-tweets feature because all of its content… is displayed inside Twitter’s frame,” the post states.
  • “It is not just a conduit for your content to reach your users whenever and wherever you wish (if it ever was) — it is a proprietary network built by a company with monetization and expansion on its mind, and your content is part of that equation.”

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