There’s nothing worse than mentioning someone on Instagram when their username is different from their Twitter name. If you tweet the image, then the username doesn’t properly sync up. For example, if your Instagram name is @Joe and your Twitter name is @JoeC, the tweet that would go out with a photo mentioning you would go to @Joe…and that was a major problem.
The team has fixed that today, according to its blog:
It can be cumbersome sharing a photo to Twitter and @mentioning someone whose Twitter username is different from their Instagram username. Today, we’ve rolled out a change that will make sharing to Twitter more seamless.
For photos shared to Twitter, Instagram now translates @mentions for users whose Twitter username and Instagram username differ.
If the @mentioned user has connected Instagram to Twitter:
The user’s Instagram username will appear in the photo caption
The user’s Twitter username will appear in the tweet
If the @mentioned user has not connected Instagram to Twitter:The user’s Instagram username will appear in the photo caption
The @ sign will be removed from the username when shared to Twitter
For @mentions that do not match any Instagram usernames, the @ sign will remain when shared to Twitter.
This was definitely a tricky problem to solve, but since most of us connect our Twitter accounts to Instagram for sharing purposes, this type of mapping was indeed possible. In fact, many of us have sat around and wondered why it didn’t come sooner.
Since these services are technically “competing”, it’s good to see Instagram playing nice for the greater good of the community. Now that it’s a part of Facebook, I imagine that we’ll see more “normalization” features coming along the way like this. Not only does this translation feature help users, but it will help Facebook track the engagement on outside networks…namely Twitter of course.
Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above. In an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos into a square...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
