

Kevin Systrom On Pulling Twitter Cards Integration - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/05/kevin-systrom-on-pulling-twitter-cards-integration-we-want-images-viewed-on-instagram-com/

======
SideburnsOfDoom
Every site wants to be the aggregator, no-one wants to be aggregated.

This is what we can't have good things.

~~~
raganwald
_Every site wants to be the aggregator, no-one wants to be aggregated._

Or as Spolsky put it: "Smart companies try to commoditize their products'
complements."

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html>

------
jasonkolb
Now that these consumer-facing companies are being pressured to monetize, the
fuzzy warm days of everyone sharing everything are over. Now we get to see
who's really holding the good cards and who's been getting by on bluffing.

For my money I think Twitter is more dependent on third parties than third
parties are on Twitter. Not just Instagram, but the entire ecosystem of apps
that grew up around Twitter in the bygone days of warm fuzzies.

Twitter seems like someone throwing a great party who slowly throws out
everyone interesting because they want to be the center of attention. Once all
the interesting people are gone though, the partiers are trickling out, and
the interesting people who made the party hot have moved on.

~~~
danso
> _For my money I think Twitter is more dependent on third parties than third
> parties are on Twitter. Not just Instagram, but the entire ecosystem of apps
> that grew up around Twitter in the bygone days of warm fuzzies._

Really? I mean, in the current scenario? The first-party Twitter apps on
mobile devices are pretty strong, enough that I don't even use TweetBot even
though I paid for it. And while Instagram was nice, I don't think I used
Twitter to view Instagram...in fact, I'm pretty happy with Twitter just being
used to share links, with which I click through.

The value of Twitter is that its network effect is such that "everyone" (at
least most people in media and tech) are on it. They may have gotten on their
through third-party apps, but now Twitter has done an adequate job on their
own apps and it'll be awhile before the Twitter network will ever migrate to
some other place (and where to, Google+?)

~~~
ricardobeat
The iOS app is nice, but I don't use it nearly as much as the "official"
desktop app (which has been completely abandoned). Gone are the days when
people would respond in real-time, now everybody is drowned in a huge feed.

~~~
drp4929
If you don't want to get drowned by your feed then you want to keep an eye on
<http://signups.simplrinc.com>

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elomarns
I understand why they're doing this. They need to control the medium where
people consume their content, so they'll be able to sell some ads. By the way,
Twitter are doing the same. Unfortunately this is one of the few options most
social networks companies see to become profitable.

But it's kind of sad that almost nobody is trying to be profitable providing
convenience and a smooth experience to their users.

~~~
manaskarekar
Wasn't that the whole point of app.net?

~~~
graue
App.net isn't a solution. They are still a centralized social network, owned
by one company. Sure, they treat users nice now, but what happens if the
business model changes?

Second, it's impossible to get on App.net's social network without paying a
significant sum of money. This means a truly diverse set of voices will never
be represented on App.net. For more, see “You Can't Start the Revolution From
the Country Club” by Anil Dash: [http://dashes.com/anil/2012/08/you-cant-
start-the-revolution...](http://dashes.com/anil/2012/08/you-cant-start-the-
revolution-from-the-country-club.html)

I have the most hope, long term, for the Tent protocol: <https://tent.io> It's
not ready for prime-time yet, and the existing hosting service is not entirely
smooth. But anyone can set up their own provider. We could have some
businesses that charge a few dollars a month, like App.net, and put users
first, and other businesses that offer free service with ads, and it would all
be on the same network, just like the competition among email and web hosting
providers today.

~~~
riffic
Ostatus is a protocol that exists today, already proven with software
(Status.net) and a community (Identi.ca)

~~~
graue
Tent is at least equally proven. I'm following 157 people (maybe ~50 are
consistently active users). Within only a few months of existence, Tent has
attracted development of an Android app[1], two iOS apps in beta[2], a very
smooth and sleek OS X app[3], and several alternative webapps[4], all made by
third-party developers with no relation to the startup that created the Tent
protocol.

I don't mean to be rude or dismissive towards another open-social project, but
I have been unimpressed with the design and usability of Identi.ca. OStatus
seems to be the work of idealistic folks who hoped they could just make an
open protocol and people would flock to it, solely because it was open.
Predictably, that hasn't happened. Open is great, but software also needs to
provide a great user experience. I think the Tent community gets this.

Tent is also more than a Twitter clone. It already supports private posts,
long-form blogging and social bookmarking, unlike OStatus, and in the months
ahead it will do much more.

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monstarlab...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monstarlab.tentmonstar)

[2] <http://signup.tentrapp.com/> and <http://bivy.me/>

[3] <http://jabs.nu/Tentia/>

[4] <http://zelten.cc/>, <http://essayist.mndj.me/>

~~~
riffic
I'm not quite sure what the advantages are between one protocol or another,
but I'm also not sure why there have to be two camps of development when one
standard can be hashed out.

I do know that the status quo of having a single private company dominating
the space is not ideal and would love to see any alternatives take root.

~~~
graue
I should have put this in my last post: “Why not OStatus”, from the Tent
authors themselves: <https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/4>

The tl;dr is that Tent is much broader in scope than OStatus while being, at
its core, simpler.

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sami36
There is no longer such a thing as "Instagram," they belong to Facebook now.
It's normal they try to distance themselves from Twitter, a competitor. Also,
to be fair, Twitter hasn't exactly been an example of openness lately, the way
they're screwing the developers who've made them what they've become is an
even more egregious example of platform lock-in.

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porterhaney
It's funny. Without Twitter and Facebook to distribute Instagram's content
they would have never been able to grow to such a size so quickly.

Now that they've reached this large critical mass of users they can afford to
go back and pull their content from the networks that made it popular in the
first place.

~~~
colkassad
One of the networks you mention owns them now. And it can be argued that
Twitter is guilty of the same thing, in light of their treatment of third
party developers. Perhaps you were being sarcastic though.

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MatthewPhillips
> “this is an evolution of where we want links to our content to go.”

Strange that he describes photos posted by users as "our content".

~~~
jmathai
It's oddly sounding very much like Twitter has been lately. I don't blame
sites for trying to monetize but this is kinda sorta a bait and switch.

Use our products for "free" and build services on top of them for "free" until
we're big enough.

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guiambros
It's hard to feel any sympathy for Twitter on this Instagram debacle, given
their track record.

Of course, users will pay the price, with a poor user experience and some
additional clicks (plus ads, FB cookies, etc). Pity. That's the problem with
being _user_ instead of _customer_. Nice and free, exactly because _we_ are
the product.

I see a Chrome extension coming in 3...2..

------
acangiano
I always found Instagram's website bizarre. Unless you own an iPhone or an
Android device you can't register with the website, see what others are
posting (even if they are making the photos public), or have a sneak preview
of what Instagram is all about.

~~~
joeblau
Yeah, that's true. The good thing is that their API has let other companies
fill that void. Although with that being said, I think Instagram is changing
it's focus with recent additions like the Facebook-like profile pages.

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psychotik
So what are they doing, technically, that makes it hard for the twitter app to
display an image inline? That URL just points to an image, so I'm not sure
what broke here.

~~~
jmathai
Twitter has an existing standard that allows them to easily discover what
image to embed. It's called Twitter Cards and Instagram had the markup for it
but apparently removed it.

It's unfortunate because any site can use Twitter Cards to have their content
displayed well in Tweets. So in my mind it's the right approach for a network
as large as Twitter. Facebook has similar tags.

<https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards>

~~~
psychotik
Thanks. Most media sites have Open Graph tags - I wonder why Twitter didn't
just reuse those. I understand they're from a competitor but they are somewhat
standard. All these proprietary tags add unnecessary overhead to developers
and bloat to pages. Sigh!

~~~
natrius
Twitter does reuse Open Graph tags.

<https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards#open-graph>

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ricardobeat
They will die together, separated.

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clark-kent
How about making instagram.com awesome so that it's a better experience than
twitter?

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caycep
back to IRC we go...

