Why should social networks play nice?

If you are anything like me, Instagram and Twitter fall out is all over your Twitter and Facebook timelines. There are people suggesting they won’t play nicely together and rumours suggesting it is all over monetisation.

The thing that most people are overlooking is social networks don’t want to play nicely with each other apart from if its commercially beneficial or have the same owners.

Let’s then address Twitter, my old social network of choice, the truth is Twitter is not a social network anymore, it has been a long process but Twitter have now decided with major influencer prompting it is a push media service.
Why? Well that’s pretty straight forward humans love to share its in our make up (yes maybe since we were gorillas, ape’s and cute little monkeys) and people slowly realised their was revenue in endorsements.

Twitter have made it much harder for platform developers (and in some cases revokes access), other social networks and starting developing strict rules which apps and developers have to adhere to.

Twitter knows their platform has to make more revenue and the way they see this happening is taking things in house, hand picking their strategic partners – whether that dev houses or celebrity users and offering different ad experiences on different devices.
Twitter is reliant on instant and smart communications not just plain text updates it was originally.

Twitter are being smart cutting ties with rich media sites and hubs – why push off their site and onto other hubs?

Instagram the one billion dollar golden child of millions, (now owned by Facebook) is the latest in a line to be unhappy with Twitter changes. Instagram arguably doesn’t need Twitter anymore and auto previewing was just an added bonus for them. Will they play fair again in the future who knows but Twitter are working on their own photo filtering software.

So Who are the losers? Well for me its the users and to an extend Twitter. Instagram doesn’t need multi platform sharing (although it greatly helps). Twitter needs strategic partners and is a Facebook owned service right for them, right now yes in the future no. So the losers are the Twitter users and Instagram models.

The ultimate questions…Will this mean the end of the truly open social networks that people fell in love with?
Yes nothing is truly free and open.

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