Twitter and Instagram are in a heated battle thanks Instagram’s new owner, Facebook. After Facebook acquired Instagram, Twitter blocked Instagram’s access to their Find a Friend API. Instagram fired back and removed support for Twitter cards, a neat way of displaying photos and images on Twitter. That explains why you don’t see Instagram images in Twitter anymore.
Both services have released updates to their mobile apps that put them in direct competition for your photos. Who will win your image?
Twitter Introduces Filters
A while back, Twitter started hosting pictures and removed support for other image hosting services like Twitpic from the official Twitter app. Now, Twitter’s improving their photo experience with the introduction of eight filters including: vignette, black and white, vintage, cinematic, and gritty.
The new filters in the twitter app are so lame. Reminds me of the wack filters in webcam software for Windows. twitter.com/corvida/status…
— Corvida Raven (@corvida) December 11, 2012
These filters will make your photos look as pretty as melted ice cream and are only available in the official Twitter app.
Instagram’s New Camera, Filter, and Newsfeed
Instagram released a few updates of its own, mainly for their iOS app. The biggest update is the camera. It’s completely redesigned with a new “Instagram-themed” shutter and optional grid guide. A preview of the latest photo in your gallery sits to the right of the shutter button. Supposedly a permanent grid guide for scaling and cropping imported pics was added, but it doesn’t show for me.
Instagram also has as new filter called Willow. The company’s blog describes Willow as “a monochrome filter with subtle purple tones and a translucent glowing white border.” Willow will be a great addition for those that love black and white or monochrome photography. Anyone else will probably overlook Willow for other filters.
Other improvements to Instagram include bigger news feed icons, improvements in the tilt-shift feature, and infinite scrolling in user profiles.
Where Will Your Photos Go?
Instagram’s [iTunes] update is newsworthy, but isn’t that big of a deal – especially for Android users. Twitter [iTunes] definitely needs to improvement their filter options if they want to compete against Instagram. Your mom or grandmother may use what Twitter offers, but anyone under the age of 35 will continue using Instagram and they’re favorite photo-editing app.
What do you think of Twitter’s new filters?
If you’re an Instagram user, what do you think of Instagram’s updates?
