http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/10/tech/social-media/twitter-instagram-photos/index.html
An amusing development here, akin to Apple not including Google Maps on the iPhone5: Instagram photos no longer display natively on Twitter.
Yes, it's very tragic: as the article points out, you now have to click through not one but two links to get to an Instagram photo that was posted on Twitter. ;)
Instagram has confirmed that this is not a mistake, but an intentional move on their part -- or, rather, Facebook's part. After all, Instagram, as everyone probably knows, is owned by Facebook (who could forget the billion-dollar acquisition last summer?).
You could call this a strategic incompatibility: Facebook was evidently worried that if users could view each other's Instagram photos on Twitter, they'd have no reason to ever visit Instagram's own site. And that in turn would mean they'd never see Instagram's ads.
This kind of planned incompatibility is interesting to me, not least because I work for a software company that has one primary competitor, and this kind of issue comes up from time to time. Users don't care about their vendors' bottom lines; they just want their data to flow from one system to another, even if those two systems happen to be locked in a fight to the death.
It was no doubt a sign that Apple and Microsoft didn't see each other as threats any more in the realm of desktop computing when the Office applications were fully ported to MacOS. But when it comes to Facebook and Twitter, the contest is still far from decided, and so the walls are going up.
An amusing development here, akin to Apple not including Google Maps on the iPhone5: Instagram photos no longer display natively on Twitter.
Yes, it's very tragic: as the article points out, you now have to click through not one but two links to get to an Instagram photo that was posted on Twitter. ;)
Instagram has confirmed that this is not a mistake, but an intentional move on their part -- or, rather, Facebook's part. After all, Instagram, as everyone probably knows, is owned by Facebook (who could forget the billion-dollar acquisition last summer?).
You could call this a strategic incompatibility: Facebook was evidently worried that if users could view each other's Instagram photos on Twitter, they'd have no reason to ever visit Instagram's own site. And that in turn would mean they'd never see Instagram's ads.
This kind of planned incompatibility is interesting to me, not least because I work for a software company that has one primary competitor, and this kind of issue comes up from time to time. Users don't care about their vendors' bottom lines; they just want their data to flow from one system to another, even if those two systems happen to be locked in a fight to the death.
It was no doubt a sign that Apple and Microsoft didn't see each other as threats any more in the realm of desktop computing when the Office applications were fully ported to MacOS. But when it comes to Facebook and Twitter, the contest is still far from decided, and so the walls are going up.
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