Within the past day or so, many Instagramers have noticed that their images are failing to show correctly on Twitter.
So much for Instagram’s days of being a one-stop distribution point for all photos social. Over the past day or so, some users have been reporting that their images shared from Instagram have failed to show correctly on Twitter or even show up at all. Images are not cropping correctly when viewed on the Twitter website or in Twitter’s photo apps.
This is not a glitch. It looks like Instagram has taken another big step forward in distancing — possibly disconnecting — itself from the Facebook-rival Twitter. More after the jump. >>>
Several other tech blogs, including MarketingLand and New York Times’ Bits are reporting collectively that Instagram has basically pulled the plug on letting Twitter display Instagrams as part of its content. Although the connection between the two has been spotty the last day or so, going forward, Instagram photos will no longer be embedded along with the rest of Twitter’s data. Instead, images shared to Twitter will be directed to Instagram’s new profile pages.
“I tried sharing a few images to Twitter from Instagram yesterday,” says Instagram user Stacy Anderson. “I hit share and it looked like they went. They never showed up in my Twitter stream, though. I gave it time. They never showed up at all.”
In a status update, Twitter confirms.
“Instagram photo-rendering issue 6 hours ago
Users are experiencing issues with viewing Instagram photos on Twitter. Issues include cropped images. This is due to Instagram disabling its Twitter cards integration, and as a result, photos are being displayed using a pre-cards experience. So, when users click on Tweets with an Instagram link, photos appear cropped.”
According to the New York Times post, while speaking at the LeWeb technology conference, “Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive, confirmed that the company has removed the ability to send pictures to Twitter, and plans to completely cut off embedding pictures on the Twitter Web site.”
He did not say when images would stop showing up within Twitter, but a quick check of my Twitter feed shows that the migration may have already started. I’ve since shot and shared images from Instagram to Twitter and it looks like all of my Instagram links now take me off of Twitter and to my IG profile page.
Speculation is that this may be in part a reaction to Twitter’s turning of Instagram access to its follower graph earlier this year, crippling the ability for Instagram users to search their Twitter network for new followers. This year, Twitter has been implementing a lot of other new policies and closed APIs — all designed to tighten its network. The end result, though, is that it’s now more controlled, exclusive and sandboxed and in the process alienating a lot of developers.
The reality is that this is probably more about your data and metrics and who controls it. Both Twitter and Facebook/Instagram are not in the social network business. They’re in the data-mining and advertising business. The social networks are now just a means to collect this data from their users.
For now, the user experience should be similar, but Facebook/Instagram gets to track and keep that much more data. Is this one more step towards an inevitable breakup of Instagram and Twitter? Your move, Twitter. Let’s see what you do….
In the meantime, you’re not imagining if your Instagrams have been behaving a little strange on Twitter recently.
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Have you been experiencing any Instagram/Twitter weirdness recently? Let us know in the comments below.
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Stacy Anderson also gets big thanks for the tip on this story.
