WASHINGTON, December 11 (RIA Novosti) - Twitter and rival Facebook’s newly acquired photo sharing application Instagram, are in the midst of what some are calling a “photo war” as the tech giants make behind the scenes changes that affect the way users can share photos between the sites.
Photos from Instagram, which Facebook recently purchased for $715 million, are no longer showing up on Twitter.
“Instagram has disabled photo integration with Twitter. As a result, photos are no longer appearing in Tweets or user photo galleries,” wrote Twitter’s staff in a blog post.
While users are still able to tweet links to Instagram photos, viewing the pictures without leaving Twitter’s site is no longer possible, the company said.
“Perhaps, Instagram doesn't want to share with Twitter the traffic pick associated with the holidays,” wrote Alex Marin a social media and tech writer in an article on the website Policymic.
On Thanksgiving alone, Instagram users posted more than 200 Thanksgiving-related photos per second, the company reported.
This latest move comes one month after the New York Times first reported Twitter is in the process of launching a photo enhancing service of its own, which will allow users to bypass Instagram altogether and apply filters to photos before tweeting them.
Earlier this summer, in an apparent attempt to distance itself from the newly acquired Facebook product, Twitter disabled Instagram’s “Find My Twitter Friends” feature that allowed users to sync their Twitter friends list with the service.
And with the growing popularity of mobile photo sharing in the US, even Google has gotten into the game.
Last week, Google launched an Instagram-like app called Snapseed that allows users to edit and share images via Google+ or other social networks.
