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To: Johnny Canuck who wrote (48847)	12/6/2012 5:29:14 AM
From: Johnny Canuck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71104

Instagram, Twitter lob grenades in war over value of photos If a picture's worth a thousand words, then control over the picture has never been more crucial in Silicon Valley. by Daniel Terdiman \|December 5, 2012 1:29 PM PST Instagram and Twitter are now in a pitched battle over who will control the photo-sharing war. (Credit: Illustration by Daniel Terdiman/CNET) You've heard it said countless times: A picture's worth a thousand words. If you think that's not at least as true online as it is offline, you haven't been paying attention to the explosive machinations in the war for digital real estate going on in Silicon Valley over the last year or so. Today, the tech world is all worked up over the latest in the slow-moving war of attrition between Instagram and Twitter. By cutting off Twitter Card integration, Instagram is hoping to wean its users off Twitter. This is a seismic event, especially with tens of millions of people flooding the Internet with photos taken on increasingly high-quality smartphone cameras. According to a study done this summer by page classifier Diffbot, 36 percent of all links shared on Twitter were for photos, a number that's surely climbing by the day. Perhaps even more striking in the Diffbot study is that of those links, 40 percent were to Twitter-hosted photos, while just 15 percent went to Instagram. Just a few years ago, this photo-sharing arms race was moving slowly, despite the plummeting cost of digital point-and-shoots. But with Apple making the camera an integral part of the iPhone, and Android phones following suit, Instagram came along and took everyone by surprise. It even caught Facebook flat-footed, given that Mark Zuckerberg's dominant social network had an obvious Achilles' heel: It was built for the Web and was having trouble keeping up on mobile. Facebook wanted photos to be a key part of users' experience, but all of a sudden, everyone with an iPhone was using Instagram. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom speaks at the LeWeb conference in Paris. (Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET) Twitter, too, was caught off guard, even though it was a mobile-centric service. Its users were passionate and shared lots of photos, but the experience seemed like an afterthought. Instagram changed all that. Twitter wanted to buy it -- and failed. Facebook ponied up and got Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and his team. At Le Web in Paris today, Systrom said one of the main reasons his service cut off the Twitter Card integration was that Instagram wants its users to view their photos on its own Web site, and not on Twitter. But he also said he expects to continue working with Twitter in one form or another. The move makes viewing Instagram photos on Twitter a worse experience, given that the images now come across oddly cropped. Some speculate that the decision was a shot directed across Twitter's bow by Facebook. Others feel that this was Systrom making his own moves to ensure his service gains ground against Twitter. But whatever the reason, it's clear that while there's no love lost between Facebook and Instagram on one side and Twitter on the other, today's move, as well as others in the battle in recent months, are all about trying to get the soldiers in line -- with users being the soldiers in this metaphor. While both Twitter and Facebook grew prodigiously, they took several years to become dominant social networks. Instagram, by comparison, is still relatively young, but is now universally acknowledged as the tool of choice for sharing photos from mobile devices, something that's even more true as its user base skyrockets in the wake of the Facebook acquisition and integration and its resulting network effects increase.