Instagram breaks it off with Twitter

The Facebook-owned photo giant entirely removes photo integration on Twitter

Twitter vs. Instagram?

Ouch! It looks like Instagram cut its final ties in photo integration with Twitter on Sunday, effectively breaking off the relationship between the two big services. Many tweeps found out the hard way, noticing that the photos they were so fervently sharing via Instagram became suddenly inaccessible on Twitter.

"Annoyed at Instagram for getting rid of the twitter integration. I hate actually clicking the Instagram link to view a photo," tweets @AlfredoFlores, and he's not alone in the sentiment. He was retweeted almost 5,000 times in under 9 hours.

Why? Well, your guess is as good as mine right now, but I suspect it might have something to do with Facebook's buy-out of Instagram in the not-so-distant past. This may be their (Instagram/Facebook's) move to either cripple Twitter's functionality, or force users to visit the Instagram page directly, where all photos are still accessible.

Just a few days ago, Instagram pulled the plug on the Cards service, where avid Twitter users could save pictures to previewable "cards" -- an apparently nifty service which is fairly missed by tweeps the microblogosphere over. So, whatever the Instagram game may be, it was probably planned.

Despite all of this, a crafty user immediately tweeted a workaround to the service disruption by the name of InstaTwit, which can be found on the Chrome Web Store for free download. Credit to Michael Schonfeld for figuring out how to keep things running smoothly.