

Instagram Stabbing Itself By Leaving Twitter Cards Off - coloneltcb
http://hunterwalk.com/2013/09/29/instagram-stabbing-itself-by-leaving-twitter-cards-off/

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itchitawa
Anyone remember the days when you had a website with your photos on it, and
you could link to and from them however you wanted? The cost of a free service
is ever-increasing anti-features. Imagine if there was an easy way to buy your
own premade website with your own domain name, with HTTP links to your
friends' websites. Of course it wouldn't be popular because it would cost the
price of a takeaway lunch and not have the magical hype feeling that a branded
service does. Or maybe I'm just too old to appreciate likes and retweets :P

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rtpg
maybe you're also too old to appreciate the network effect? instagram is also
about giving an easier discoverability mechanism and ease of use through apps,
etc.

Also a lot less likely you accidentally erase all your pics or your site stops
working because of some silly reason.

If you want to pay for photo hosting, there's picassa or flickr for that too.

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eigenvector
Instagram is also stabbing itself by making it difficult to share an Instagram
photo's URL with people outside of the service. Instagram for Android does not
support the OS's native 'share' functionality (an option to copy a URL to the
clipboard was recently added but is hidden behind an overflow menu). I'd like
to drive traffic to their service by sharing a URL with friends but Instagram
deliberately makes this difficult.

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w1ntermute
I don't even understand the point of Instagram these days. You can just take a
picture with the default camera app, apply a filter from within it, and then
tweet it using Twitter's image hosting service.

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film42
I believe it's the same reason why people are sticking with facebook--their
friends are there.

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w1ntermute
If your friends are on Instagram, aren't they also already on Twitter?

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next89
Nope, at least not in my case. I'd say that only 20-30% of the people I follow
on Instagram (mostly Facebook friends) are on Twitter.

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kingnight
I respectfully disagree. I think Twitter putting more emphasis on media is at
odds with Instagram — me thinks they would rather emphasize Twitter-specific
content.

It would also be detrimental too for Instagram's future attempts to monetize
itself. Why would FB/IG let the Instagram experience bleed elsewhere if they
can only monetize it locally. They may eventually go the Twitter route of
scaling back their API.

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kattuviriyan
Yes. It is easy to insert ads to the embedded video(YouTube). It's not the
case with embedded Images.It only helps to improve the Twitter experience. I
don't remember clicking on the images(when they allowed it) to go the
Instagram site. Nowadays, I sometimes click on the Instagaram links based on
the info provided.

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robszumski
I frequently run into an Instagram photo that I want to view inline on Twitter
and can't. As a user, it is extremely frustrating. An interesting side affect
of this is how easy the embedded web browser in the mobile app makes this feel
fairly seamless anyways. It falls apart on a laptop -- for some reason I can't
muster the effort to open and switch to a new tab. Losing the context sucks.

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benatkin
I strongly disagree. This is why I usually skip instagram photos when I see
them on twitter. If I didn't skip them I would be less inclined to check my
Instagram feed inside the Instagram app. This would lead to less double-
tapping on photos I like, which would mean less incentive for the people I
follow to post photos to Instagram.

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next89
You are looking at it from the content consumer perspective. I'll give you the
content producer view. When I realized that my Instagram pictures had far less
reach on twitter than other options, I stopped using Instagram to share
pictures on Twitter.

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madoublet
Your experience might be different, but I know a lot more people who use
Instagram in closed networks than open networks. I would speculate that its
growth is tied more closely to closed networks than it is to whether it
enables cards in Twitter.

