Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are fighting over your pictures

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are fighting over your pictures

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are having a tiff about who gets to see your pictures.

instagram facebook and twitter

When social networking sites fight, users lose.

There’s a reason your Instagram photos aren’t showing up properly on Twitter today. The New York Times goes into the details of the story, but the basic idea is that, ever since Facebook bought Instagram, the relationship between Instagram and Twitter has been falling apart. Those relationship problems came to a head today, December 5, when Instagram decided to stop supporting embedded photos within Twitter, causing them to show up cropped and off-center. Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s chief-executive, confirmed his company’s move and added that Twitter will be completely cut off from embedding photos in the future.

As Instagram moves to make their photo-sharing more social by integrating with Facebook, Twitter has also been making moves to add the ability for Twitter users to add photo filters in much the same way Instagram does, negating the need for Instagram. In the meantime, the ability to “sync users” — the ability to place an @ in front of a Twitter user’s name and direct the photo at them —  is going away, as Twitter will no longer support the function on Instagram.

It’s not clear who all of this bickering is supposed to benefit, but one clear loser is us: the users.

When social networking sites decide to stop getting along, it makes it difficult for everyday users to share photos with friends and family. Not all of your friends are on Twitter, just as not everyone you follow on Twitter use Facebook, so to cut off a large group of users not only keeps them from interacting with the things you do, but it can hurt your brand if you rely on those networks to bring traffic to your site. So, what can you do?

Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do about Twitter and Instagram not getting along, but if you hosted your content on your own website, you’d be able to share it with everyone — regardless of what network they choose. And, by using a content management system such as WordPress, there are plugins available that will allow you to share images easily with both networks, just like before. Why rely on the terrible choices and business tactics of others when you can do everything you want on your own site? That’s true freedom!