Instagram pulls photo images from Tweets

Photo images from the popular photo sharing service went dark Sunday on Twitter, a decision, Twitter says, that was made by Instagram, which was acquired earlier in the year for $1 billion by Facebook.

"Instagram has disabled photo integration with Twitter," the micro-blogging site wrote in a status update, USA Today reports. "As a result, photos are no longer appearing in Tweets or user photo galleries."

Photos can still be shared from Instagram via a direct link on Twitter, but the photo isn't visible in the Tweet, "as was previously the case," Twitter noted.

The Instagram social network on Apple's iOS devices and Google's Android devices has 80 million members, most of whom view photos on their devices.

In an appearance last week, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said he wanted folks viewing photos on his service.
"Really it's about where do you go to consume that image, to interact with that image. We want that to be on Instagram," Systrom said at the LeWeb conference in Paris. "What we realized over time is we really needed to have an awesome Web presence."

Online, if you go to the Instagram website, you can't easily view photos. To make that happen, you have to type in the user name in the URL, as in 'http://instagram.com/yourname.'

Meanwhile all may not be lost for viewing Instagram photos on Twitter. User Michael Schonfeld tweeted a workaround Sunday, an extension called "InstaTwit" for Google's Chrome browser that returns photo viewing from Instagram to the tweet.