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Touché! Instagram Starts Pulling Its Images From Twitter

Matt McGee on December 5, 2012 at 12:41 pm

kids-fighting-200px You’ll be excused if you think the social media platform battles are starting to look like something you’d see on Romper Room.

The latest step in this back-and-forth is Instagram’s decision to prevent its images from showing properly on Twitter’s website and clients.

At the LeWeb conference today, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom confirmed the move and said that his company plans to fully prevent Instagram images from being embedded on Twitter. Here’s how he’s quoted on the New York Times’ Bits blog:

We’ve decided that right now, what makes sense, is to direct our users to the Instagram Web site…. Obviously things change as a company evolves.

Instagram recently launched user profiles on the web, which creates a stronger need for the company to drive eyeballs to Instagram images.

Twitter confirmed the image display problem in an update a few hours ago, saying Instagram is “disabling its Twitter cards integration, and as a result, photos are being displayed using a pre-cards experience.”

You could say that Twitter has brought this on itself due to its frosty approach in recent months toward developers and other social platforms. Over the summer, Twitter turned off Instagram’s access to its follower graph, taking away the ability for Instagram users to grow their network there on the strength of their Twitter connections.

All Romper Room references aside, the fight over user experience and eyeballs is Important Business for the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others. It’s a shame that these platforms won’t play nicely together, but I suspect that what we’re seeing now is only bound to continue.

UPDATE: It has been confirmed that Instagram images are no longer being pulled to Twitter. All Instagram images will now only be able to be viewed when a user clicks through an Instagram link.

About The Author

Matt McGee

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.