While Twitter and Instagram have been publicly waging a war on how we share our images and see them online, Pinterest has quietly entered the fray. Today, Pinterest has implemented support for Twitter Cards which means that when you share a new Pin to Twitter, your Twitter followers will be able to see the image embedded within the expanded Tweet. This is exactly the functionality that Instagram just removed, in order to force users to follow a link to Instagram.
As the Internet becomes more and more visual, this is the kind of feature and integration that social network users are looking for. While we can understand the business motives behind restricting what content is viewed on other competing networks, from a user persective, the changes being forced by Instagram and Twitter are restrictive and frustrating.
One catch with this Pinterest development is that the images posted do not appear in the user’s photo timeline, like images uploaded directly do, or how images from Instagram once did.
Pinterest is the fastest growing social network, and is quickly catching Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn in popularity. Because Pinterest is an extremely visual experience, it would seem to be a great match with the new Twitter and expanded tweets.
Check out the new feature from Pinterest. You don’t have to update your app or anything – just go to Pinterest from your app or web browser, repin something, and choose to share it to Twitter. What do you think?