This weekend the blogosphere is abuzz with news that Twitter is planning to build Instagram-like photo filters into a new version of its mobile app, which will reportedly be released in time to take advantage of all those Winter Holiday photos.
The move makes sense – photo sharing apps have exploded. Notably, Instagram got a big boost as it saw over 10 million photos posted on the day of Thanksgiving, a record high. Twitter clearly wants some of that action, and filters are a way of enriching the whole experience for its users and creating more engagement. But could Twitter be lifting some ideas from startups out there? We’ve heard rumours that one feature of the new Twitter app – allowing a simple swipe of the screen to change filters – looks suspiciously like the feature on EyeEm’s app, the Berlin-based photo discovery startup. We’re not suggesting that Twitter will have seen it there, but it’s clearly going to be interesting if Twitter’s new app has that kind of feature in it.
Here’s a video of EyeEm’s app in action:
How the new Twitter app may work is anyone’s guess, of course, but there have been observations that Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey has been doing a lot of heavy posting of black-and-white filtered photos lately. Twitter hasn’t commented on the rumors yet.
All of this comes in the context of Instagram snubbing Twitter last Wednesday by turning off “Cards,” the functionality which showed Instagram photos properly inside the Twitter stream, leading to cries of “The Photo Wars” kicking off. Facebook is benefitting from Instagram’s direct integration into the news feed, so clearly Twitter wants some of that high engagement that photos, and particularly photo filters, bring as well. Google+ just launched its own photo-editing app, Snapseed, just this week.