Instagram disables image displays on Twitter

Instagram has disabled a Twitter integration feature that allowed users to display photos on the microblogging site, causing a stream of user complaints.

Users of the Twitter website and third-party applications will see images displayed cropped and off-centre in tweets from now on as a result of the change.

Twitter acknowledged the problem with cropped images on its status blog, attributing it to "Instagram disabling its Twitter cards integration and as a result, photos are being displayed using a pre-cards experience."

Twitter cards is a developer feature used to attach media content to tweets.

According to the New York Times Bits blog, Kevin Systrom, chief executive of Instagram, confirmed the change at the LeWeb conference in Paris.

He is reported as saying that Instagram wants to direct users to its own site instead, and that soon, users' images won't be visible on Twitter at all.

However, other social sites such as Facebook, Tumblr and Foursquare are not affected by the change, Systrom said.

The wildly popular Instragram photo filter app for Apple iOS and Google Android is thought to have around 100 million users and was acquired by Facebook this year for US$715 million ($683 million).

Twitter and Instagram are in direct competition with each other after the Facebook buy, since Twitter intends to build photo filters into its own mobile application.