After Instagram was acquired by Facebook earlier this year, Instagrammers have worried that some changes are coming to the popular photo sharing app. On Wednesday, a big change was made to Instagram that disabled the ability for Twitter to properly display photos on the Twitter website.
Instagram images viewed through Twitter this morning now appear cropped and off-center. The change comes from Instagram disabling its integration with Twitter cards, which is used to display images and content within Twitter messages.
To properly view an Instagram photo, Twitter users now need to click on the link to the picture and view it on Instagram’s website. At this time it sounds like Instagram does not plan to bring Twitter cards integration back to their photo sharing service.
In an interview at the LeWeb technology conference, Instagram’s chief executive, Kevin Systrom, declared, “We’ve decided that right now, what makes sense, is to direct our users to the Instagram website,” even though he conceded that the change is really confusing to users.
For the time being Instagram users can still post photos to Twitter, but in the future Twitter might lose the ability to display those pictures all together. It appears that Instagram’s strategy is to start herding users over to their website more frequently so they can be monetized in the future, because you know, someone’s gotta pay for the party.
Source: New York Times
