It took about 8 months from this thread publicly acknowledging the idea of IG images returning to tweets until this shipped.
https://twitter.com/mosseri/status/1372616225788895232But there’s a bigger lesson here…
https://twitter.com/instagram/status/1455947657067782148
Nine years ago, Instagram images used to show up natively in tweets; this wasn’t a surprise as the two companies shared a lot of DNA in common in terms of people & goals. That, of course, started to split when Facebook bought Instagram…
But the bigger lesson isn’t just about corporate politics with Facebook. In fact, Twitter used to support *many* services for hosting your photos, but over time they all went away in favor of just the built-in Twitter-owned images. (Which did improve in resolution over time.)
The common idea, though, when Twitter started during the Web 2.0 era, was that all these services would support open standard for interoperable images, and seamlessly connect. The big platforms gave lip service to that idea, then killed off all ability for users to do so.
If you think a new “version” of the web, funded by the same people, trying to reward the same incentives, is going to suddenly voluntarily make their platforms interoperable, well I have a few billion users and a few trillion dollars worth of legacy platforms that says otherwise.
Instagram cut off native sharing of their images on Twitter because that’s what Facebook does. They have opened it back up because they’re actually afraid of regulation this time & the criticisms are finally landing. techcrunch.com/2012/12/05/kev… Web3 will play out the same way.
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