Why Twitter Introduced Photo Filters

I wrote a long thing about Twitter’s new photo filters today. But if you want to know why they did it, here’s that bit boiled down into one image:

Instagram emptied out my Twitter profile’s photo gallery in one flick of the switch. As photos and other media become a bigger part of Twitter’s strategy in the future, it can’t have this kind of thing completely at the mercy of a service owned by a competitor. Those galleries started out on partner pages, then they showed up in profiles and now search. Soon, they’ll be on the website everywhere as well, not just the Discover tab.

If Twitter’s future is a rich service that is attractive to both celebrities and regular people as a way to share every bit of media that they create — and I believe that it is — then it has to safeguard that status. Photo filters and galleries are one way of doing this. Video is next.