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Twitter Moves To Curb Instagram Links

Posted by timothy on from the breaking-the-habit dept.

Hammeh writes According to a report on Mashable, Twitter have sent out messages to some of their high profile users prompting them to share images using Twitter's own service rather than Instagram links. The news comes 2 years since Instagram pulled support for Twitter cards and has been part of the continuing battle between the two social networks. With Instagram now having overtaken Twitter in terms of users, this may be a move to try and use high profile users to show off Twitter's own image and content tools.

18 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Never forget... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Never forget: You are the product, not the customer.

  2. Social Networking is a mess by Iamthecheese · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Social networking sites have forgotten the reason they exist, and the reason people use them. People don't go to a social networking site to be monetized, they tolerate being monetized so long as the social network provides sufficient value.

    It's a similar situation to the early days of searching. People didn't go to early Yahoo.com to get the things Yahoo wanted to push, people went to search the internet and tolerated having things pushed at them as long as the search was good enough. But as soon as Google offered a good search with minimal advertising the market spoke very loudly about that kind of thing. I feel like there's a pent-up demand in social networking for low friction, low-bullshit connecting of people. The first social network that offers a superior product and doesn't stand in peoples' way will make a killing.

    --
    If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
    1. Re:Social Networking is a mess by CaptainDork · · Score: 2

      ... will make a killing.

      How?

      --
      It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
    2. Re:Social Networking is a mess by Iamthecheese · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How?

      When old Yahoo made money from its search engine it did so by pushing paid sites as search results, cluttering up the interface with advertisements, and otherwise being intrusive and unpleasant. And it lacked the self-awareness to change this behavior. Rather than saying, "How can we make things better for the user?" they said, "How can we make more money from the user?" So while better search results was on their radar an interface like Google's just never came up as a possibility. That's why they were blown completely out of the water. Google made money as a search provider without using Yahoo-esque tactics by being the first to do what present social networks are doing (analytics) but more importantly by being a place users wanted to go. Twitter is already doing this successfully. Look at their interface: light, efficient, smooth, and fast. And they're very successful. By limiting user actions now they're eating the seed corn. The'll make more money in the short term but in the long term they're pushing users to less limited places.

      But I digress. By "social networking" I meant Facebook-esque networking. Attempts to allow comprehensive social collectives to happen. Facebook has fallen far down the monetization rabbit hole in the same way old Yahoo did. The way Facebook thinks is of where to put ads, how to better manipulate users into sub-optimal decisions (such as mis-click capture), how to make games that will best entangle users ... Rather than saying, "How can we make things better for the user?" they say, "How can we make more money from the user?" The money is in having many users and in letting them do what they do, with a completely unobtrusive, subtle advertising network offering things they like and want. When a social network focuses to a massive extent on making the user experience as excellent as possible even if that's less immediately profitable they'll get more than enough market share to make up the difference.

      --
      If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
  3. the problem with Twitter by slashmydots · · Score: 5, Insightful

    140 characters ISN'T ENOUGH! That's not enough to say anything of substance. 300 characters is sufficient and almost as quick to read. If there was a service that came out with 300 characters as a limit, it would crush Twitter. They should get it through their thick heads that superior services will demolish their business if they don't listen to the number one complaint about Twitter from their users!

    1. Re:the problem with Twitter by inflex · · Score: 4, Interesting

      +1 to this.

      I appreciate the terseness of Twitter's 140char limit, but it's a little *too* restrictive. I agree it makes people creative, but after a while the shine goes off that when you're just trying to get something important out there which could be better said with a few more characters rather than making people jump via a URL to somewhere else.

      Maybe they should just abolish the limit entirely. Not like we're confined to the restrictions of SMS as the data carrier any more.

    2. Re:the problem with Twitter by gman003 · · Score: 2

      140 characters ISN'T ENOUGH! That's not enough to say anything of substance.

      With you so far.

      If there was a service that came out with 300 characters as a limit, it would crush Twitter.

      And now you lost me. Twitter isn't for "anything of substance". It's either insubstantial stuff, or links to substantial stuff. People don't use it as, or want it to be, a place for "anything of substance". Leave that to the blogs.

    3. Re:the problem with Twitter by marcansoft · · Score: 4, Interesting

      140 characters isn't enough ... in English. You should see the novels that Japanese people post on Twitter. Japanese is about 2x denser per character than English, so you can fit in a lot more stuff. I was amazed when I was able to compose an elaborate explanation for someone in Japanese and it still fit in one tweet (I'm learning the language).

    4. Re:the problem with Twitter by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

      I don't know, 140 seems like a lot to me when you consider hobbies like six word stories. (not trying to plug the site, it was just the first one that came up in a search, there are a few others that do various numbers of word "stories").

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    5. Re:the problem with Twitter by FunkSoulBrother · · Score: 2

      Actually that took you 150 chars, considering your character count was part of your point. Better luck next time. [127 chars]

    6. Re:the problem with Twitter by ultranova · · Score: 2

      140 characters ISN'T ENOUGH! That's not enough to say anything of substance.

      140 chars is enough for a pithy soundbyte. Those pay better than analysis. Blog if you want to write a manifesto.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  4. I in never post on ... by raymorris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I never post anywhere. I don't post on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Slashd ... oh crap.

    Seriously though, I don't have a Twitter account. I looked at Twitter once or twice and I found it lacking either of two things that would make it useful. I might find it useful if I could either find stuff by topic or through a social NETWORK, but it doesn't seem to be made for searching or exploring, only for following a specific celebrity you've already chosen. I might be interested in feeds about a certain topic. Twitter doesn't do that. I might be interested in seeing what old friends are up to, finding all the people I went to high school with like Facebook. Maybe when I look up what my friend is doing I would click to see whatever happened to his hot sister.

    Twitter may have changed since I last looked at it, or those functions might have been there, but not just intuitive how to do those things.

    1. Re:I in never post on ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I use Twitter instead of SMS for alert messages,.This was because I had *three jobs in a row* where the chief architect and me, as a new lead systems guy, got more than 300 alerts per day for which the architects always said "just pay attention to the important ones", and refused to define what was "important". Then they'd flip out when I didn't respond to the "critical" alerts within 15 minutes, because Verizon insisted on waiting up to an hour to send all the messages as a flood, rather than when they were sent.

      Twitter, at least, solved that problem by delivering the messages instantly and consistently, and providing reviewable web access to all the messages.

  5. Impressive... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Twitter vs. Instagram" is a frankly solid entrant for 'year's most meaningless first world battle' and we haven't even made it out of January. Nice work.

  6. Re:Disintegration of the ecosystem by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In this case, it's actually rather impressive how badly the twits appear to have forgotten.

    "Hey, let's select a group of our most influential users and then annoy them with an unexpected and minimally useful nag screen when they try to use our service!" is a plan that sounds like a joke, not a strategy; but apparently twitter is now doing exactly that. Are they really gambling that all those users are just morons who are too stupid to realize that twitter has a given set of features; but would totally love to embrace them over a competitor they already use if only they are nagged enough? That seems...a trifle optimistic.

  7. Perspective by pak9rabid · · Score: 2

    Mark Zuckerberg: Neat *grabs popcorn*

    1. Re:Perspective by _xeno_ · · Score: 2

      Zuckerberg owns Instagram (well, Facebook owns Instagram), so Zuckerberg isn't exactly on the sidelines for this thing.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
  8. As an active user of both... by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 2

    Twitter's request is asinine. Twitter is only set up to share with other Twitter users. When I post something to Instagram, I get to share with people on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I do occasionally use VSCO and send things to each service individually (usually when I want to preserve the aspect ratio of an image; the lower res square that Instagram demands doesn't always work best).

    If Twitter wants people to use their service for images, they have to make it easier to share outside of their network. People interested in sharing usually want to cover all their bases, not just one population.

    But this is what's wrong with Twitter's current managementâ"they don't understand their own service and the people that use it. And they don't seem to get that if you want to grow, you have to reach outside of the network and bring people in, not broadcast to the people that are already there. I have friends that have joined Twitter because of my own active cross-posting (using third party tools)â"if Twitter made that part easier, maybe they could convince people to give them a shot. (That and doubling back and making third party clients easier to develop again; the official app is trash compared to Tweetbot. If they want ads, just make it part of the stream that the clients can't skip. It's not so hard.)