Instagram post previews work on Twitter again after almost a decade

Today Instagram proudly announced that you can now see previews of Instagram posts on Twitter. These will automatically be made into a card format once you enter any Instagram link into any tweet.

That sounds like a neat feature to have, of course, but you might wonder why it wasn't there in the first place - and what's with the "they said it would never happen" thing Instagram's Twitter account went on about.

They said it would never happen… Twitter Card previews start rolling out TODAY. 👀

Now, when you share an Instagram link on Twitter a preview of that post will appear. 🙌 pic.twitter.com/XSZRx9dzd1

— Instagram (@instagram) November 3, 2021

Well, it turns out that this functionality actually did exist, until Facebook bought Instagram almost a decade ago. Following that move, Twitter blocked Instagram from using its API to allow people to find Twitter friends on Instagram, and then Instagram retaliated by preventing Twitter from embedding Instagram posts into tweets when users shared an Instagram link.

No, seriously, these multi-billion dollar companies really are that petty. What changed today? Well, Facebook (erm, sorry, we mean Meta) seems to recently have embarked on a quest to somehow improve its notoriously bad public image. That started with the company itself rebranding to Meta, and then yesterday was followed up by the announcement that auto face tagging would be shut down. This is just another step in the same strategy, we assume - although arguably a much smaller one.

Via