Despite the whining that went on when Instagram was purchased by Facebook, the ever popular sharing platform continues to grow. Eighty million users strong, and Instagram is happy to brag about it. Less brag worthy is that integral functionality from previous versions is going away all thanks to Twitter’s obnoxious business plan.
Instagram has just announced 80 million users and a new app update; Noticeably missing in the update? The “Find Your Friends” on Twitter feature, which allowed users to follow the same people they follow on Twitter on Instagram. The “Tweet Photo” feature is still available. We’ve learned that the feature is missing due to API restrictions from Twitter’s end, restrictions that possibly came about over concerns about Instagram’s scale and its strain on data pulls.
Clearly, Twitter is sick and tired of people piggybacking off of their network, and the last thing they want is Facebook profiting from their graph. It’s easy to understand why Twitter is making these moves to shut out competitors, but it means that the user experience for Twitter fans is just going to continue to get worse if you’re not strictly interested in following celebrities and reading the atrocious trending topics.
Now we just have to sit and wait until Dick and friends decide that Twitterriffic and Tweetbot need to go. Their intentions are completely transparant: If you’re trying to do anything besides sending content to Twitter, we don’t want you around. The nerd crowd that got Twitter off the ground isn’t going to like that very much, but it remains unclear if that will make any difference whatsoever. For now, we wait.
Source: TechCrunch
