Facebook Inc's recently acquired photo-sharing service Instagram removed
a key element of its integration with Twitter, signaling a deepening
rift between two of the Web's dominant social media companies.
Instagram
Chief Executive Kevin Systrom said Wednesday his company turned off
support for Twitter "cards" in order to drive Twitter users to
Instagram's own website. Twitter "cards" are a feature that allows
multimedia content like YouTube videos and Instagram photos to be
embedded and viewed directly within a Twitter message.
The move
marked the latest clash between Facebook and Twitter since April, when
Facebook, the world's no. 1 social network, outbid Twitter to nab
fast-growing Instagram in a cash-and-stock deal valued at the time at $1
billion. The acquisition closed in September for roughly $715 million,
reflecting Facebook's recent stock drop.
The companies' ties have
been strained since. In July, Twitter blocked Instagram from using its
data to help new Instagram users find friends.
Beginning earlier
this week, Twitter's users began to complain in public messages that
Instagram photos did not seem to display properly on Twitter's website.
Systrom
confirmed Wednesday that his company had decided its users should view
photos on Instagram's own Web pages and took steps to change its
policies.
"We believe the best experience is for us to link back
to where the content lives," Systrom said in a statement, citing recent
improvements to Instagram's website.
"A handful of months ago, we
supported Twitter cards because we had a minimal Web presence," Systrom
said, noting that the company has since released new features that allow
users to comment about and "like" photos directly on Instagram's
website.
The move escalates a rivalry in the fast-growing social
networking sector, where the biggest players have sought to wall off
access to content from rival services and to their ranks of users.
"They're
both competing for slices of the same pie, the pie being users'
attention," said Ray Valdes, an analyst with research firm Gartner.
If
Facebook decides to offer advertising on Instagram, it's important that
the users visit Instagram's own website, said Valdes. "If the eyeballs
are elsewhere, you have less to work with in terms of monetization," he
said.
Photos are among the most popular features on both Facebook
and Twitter, and Instagram's meteoric rise in recent years has further
proved how picture-sharing has become a key front in the battle for
social Internet supremacy.
Instagram, which has 100 million users,
allows consumers to tweak the photos they take on their smartphones and
share the images with friends, a feature that Twitter has reportedly
also begun to develop. Twitter's executive chairman, Jack Dorsey, was an
early investor in Instagram and had hoped to acquire it before Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a successful bid.
When Zuckerberg
announced the acquisition in an April blog post, he highlighted
Instagram's inter-connectivity with other social networks.
"We
think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond
Facebook is an important part of the experience," Zuckerberg wrote. "We
plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social
networks."
A Twitter spokesman declined comment Wednesday, but a
status message on Twitter's website confirmed that users are
"experiencing issues," such as "cropped images" when viewing Instagram
photos on Twitter.
© Thomson Reuters 2012