If you use the two services, then the chances are that you are well aware that Instagram has withdrawn support for Twitter Cards, which means that images from the Facebook-owned photo sharing service no longer show up on Twitter users’ feeds. IFTTT has a solution for Instagram users and Tweetbot does the business on mobile, but here’s the simplest way yet to get around the problem on your desktop — InstaTwit, a Google Chrome extension.
Dwolla evangelist Michael Schonfeld (@BaconSeason) — who you may recall built a retweeter counter for Obama’s same sex marriage tweet, back in the days when Twitter’s own counter clocked out at “50+” — built the extension which works in the background to put Instagram images back into your Twitter timeline.
The beauty of this one is, aside from its simplicity, is that it will put all photos from Instagram into cards regardless of whether the person sending it uses the IFTTT shortcut. The only thing you need to do is click expand’. Unfortunately it is just for Chrome users, but that’s most of the online world these days.
Schonfeld explains more:
“There’s nothing secret here: it scans the tweet text when you click to “open a card”. If it sees an Instagram link, it figures out the photo URL, and injects it right into the card.”
It’s super simple and most importantly it works, here’s proof:
Schonfeld also just updated the extension — now version 1.1 — to add support for individual tweet URLs; it works like a treat:
Best part is that Schonfeld is pretty confident his extension is up to the task, even if Instagram tries to work against it.
“Hypothetically Instagram could change their URL structure. See, right now, it looks for the text “instagr.am” in the Tweet’s text, if it finds it, then it knows there’s a photo there. If Instagram changed its URL shortner to something like “links.instagram.com then this would stop working. But then I would just update my extension…and that will fix it right back.”
Check it out at the link below and get back to enjoying the benefits of Instagram inline.
Headline image via potzuyoko / Flickr
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