The Twitter mobile apps will add photo filters to lure in Instagram users

Dec 10, 2012 10:02 GMT  ·  By

Surprising no one, Instagram photos are now completely gone from Twitter. The two companies had a falling out last week, though the tension between them had been rising since Instagram was bought by Facebook.

Instagram cut off Twitter's access to the API last week, resulting in botched Twitter cards for Instagram photos.

Cards are the media additions to simple tweets, things like photos, excerpts from links or videos. They're supposed to be the future of Twitter and developers are encouraged to create apps that work inside these cards, therefore on Twitter itself.

The success of Twitter cards depends on developers and third-party websites using them. Losing Instagram is a big blow, users can still link to photos, but the photos themselves will not show up on Twitter.

"Instagram has disabled photo integration with Twitter. As a result, photos are no longer appearing in Tweets or user photo galleries," Twitter wrote.

"While tweeting links to Instagram photos is still possible, you can no longer view the photos on Twitter, as was previously the case," it explained.

There are ways of getting Instagram photos back on Twitter though, if you really want to, but they involve more effort compared to the way things used to work.

Instagram has been building up its web presence and hopes that the move will push more people to visit its website. Instagram has the scale to compete with Twitter, with over 100 million users, but its success on the web is far from guaranteed, despite Facebook's experience.

Twitter plans to compete with Instagram as well, it's been working on adding photo filters to its mobile apps. It's a trivial feature, but Twitter has some things going for it. While filters alone mean nothing, Twitter is already big enough for plenty of people to start using it as a photo sharing app.