Anyone remember the days when you had a website with your photos on it, and you could link to and from them however you wanted? The cost of a free service is ever-increasing anti-features. Imagine if there was an easy way to buy your own premade website with your own domain name, with HTTP links to your friends' websites. Of course it wouldn't be popular because it would cost the price of a takeaway lunch and not have the magical hype feeling that a branded service does. Or maybe I'm just too old to appreciate likes and retweets :P

maybe you're also too old to appreciate the network effect? instagram is also about giving an easier discoverability mechanism and ease of use through apps, etc.

Also a lot less likely you accidentally erase all your pics or your site stops working because of some silly reason.

If you want to pay for photo hosting, there's picassa or flickr for that too.

Instagram is also stabbing itself by making it difficult to share an Instagram photo's URL with people outside of the service. Instagram for Android does not support the OS's native 'share' functionality (an option to copy a URL to the clipboard was recently added but is hidden behind an overflow menu). I'd like to drive traffic to their service by sharing a URL with friends but Instagram deliberately makes this difficult.

I don't even understand the point of Instagram these days. You can just take a picture with the default camera app, apply a filter from within it, and then tweet it using Twitter's image hosting service.

Instagram is not about the filters, its about the social network, I follow all my favorite artists there

I believe it's the same reason why people are sticking with facebook--their friends are there.

If your friends are on Instagram, aren't they also already on Twitter?

Nope, at least not in my case. I'd say that only 20-30% of the people I follow on Instagram (mostly Facebook friends) are on Twitter.

very few of my friends actively use twitter, it feels like there was a six month window there when many of them did, then instagram came onto the scene. It kind of felt like both services became mainstream (my friend base) at about the same time.

The user experience isn't as good with the default camera + filter, and upload process.

I agree. The new iOS7 has built in filters when using the default camera app. It was only a matter of time before others caught up with it. Not that Instragram offers any mind shattering feature.

There's also a useful side effect to Instagram.

It resizes and crops the picture, making it much smaller for uploads.

(Their resize filter is bad though)

I respectfully disagree. I think Twitter putting more emphasis on media is at odds with Instagram — me thinks they would rather emphasize Twitter-specific content.

It would also be detrimental too for Instagram's future attempts to monetize itself. Why would FB/IG let the Instagram experience bleed elsewhere if they can only monetize it locally. They may eventually go the Twitter route of scaling back their API.

Yes. It is easy to insert ads to the embedded video(YouTube). It's not the case with embedded Images.It only helps to improve the Twitter experience. I don't remember clicking on the images(when they allowed it) to go the Instagram site. Nowadays, I sometimes click on the Instagaram links based on the info provided.

I frequently run into an Instagram photo that I want to view inline on Twitter and can't. As a user, it is extremely frustrating. An interesting side affect of this is how easy the embedded web browser in the mobile app makes this feel fairly seamless anyways. It falls apart on a laptop -- for some reason I can't muster the effort to open and switch to a new tab. Losing the context sucks.

I strongly disagree. This is why I usually skip instagram photos when I see them on twitter. If I didn't skip them I would be less inclined to check my Instagram feed inside the Instagram app. This would lead to less double-tapping on photos I like, which would mean less incentive for the people I follow to post photos to Instagram.

You are looking at it from the content consumer perspective. I'll give you the content producer view. When I realized that my Instagram pictures had far less reach on twitter than other options, I stopped using Instagram to share pictures on Twitter.

Your experience might be different, but I know a lot more people who use Instagram in closed networks than open networks. I would speculate that its growth is tied more closely to closed networks than it is to whether it enables cards in Twitter.