Starting with LinkedIn, Twitter has been publicly making moves to gain more control over Twitter user’s experience. Several weeks ago, Twitter severed ties with LinkedIn and stopped allowing Twitter user’s Tweets to be automatically displayed within the LinkedIn site on user’s profile pages. Now, Instagram is next.
Instagram is the photo sharing social network recently purchased by Facebook. Instagram users can take or upload a photo, apply some editing or effects, and then share that photo with other Instagram users, as well as post it to Facebook, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr and of course, Twitter. Instagram users can look for their existing friends and follow them by connecting their Facebook or Twitter accounts and searching through their connections.
Now, however, Twitter has cut off Instagram and Instagram users from being able to view or follow their Twitter friends. Instagram users are presented with this charming error:
Last month, Twitter announced that it would be making a series of changes to bring a more “consistent experience” to Twitter users, which it’s been suggested is motivated from a need to make sure Twitter users are actually using the Twitter platform in order to drive ad revenue. There has been no mention of this recent change on Twitter’s blog. We can likely expect an udpate to the Instagram app soon which will remove the ability to try to look for friends on Twitter completely.
What’s next for Twitter and other connected platforms? Forbes has suggested that dramatic changes are in store for Twitter’s relationship with Facebook. How would that impact you? Do you think think these changes are good and positive for Twitter, or will they have a negative impact on your willingness to use Twitter’s network?