Instagram Gets Tighter with Twitter, Adds @Mmentions

These days every mobile phone, even the non-smartphones, come with a camera built in.  There are also hundreds of third-party camera apps, like Cartoon Camera for Android, which Ghacks just looked at earlier today.  One third-party camera app, Instagram, took things to a new level by bringing "social" to the platform in a whole new way.  No, they weren't the first to try this - Picplz beat them to launch, but Instagram won the battle by simply implementing better.  Now, today, they have gone a step further by tightening their integration with Twitter.

Instagram has always had integration with social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Tumblr and Flickr, but today the service announced that Twitter @mentions would become a part of user posts.  Previously users could share a photo via Twitter and even add @mentions, but the process was difficult if the person in question used a different handle for the two services.

According to the announcement:

If the @mentioned user has connected Instagram to Twitter:

• The user’s Instagram username will appear in the photo caption
• The user’s Twitter username will appear in the tweet

If the @mentioned user has not connected Instagram to Twitter:

• The user’s Instagram username will appear in the photo caption
• The @ sign will be removed from the username when shared to Twitter

For @mentions that do not match any Instagram usernames, the @ sign will remain when shared to Twitter.

This will make a lot of users happy, given the previous problems with this process.  The update began rolling out today, but hasn't yet hit the Google Play Store, at least for everyone.  Similarly, the update also doesn't yet show in the iTunes Store, but perhaps some of you have already received it and can chime in with a comment below.

Instagram has been pushing updates fairly quickly of late and, now that they are also on Android, the service has grown even faster.  Of course, it doesn't hurt to have the significant backing of Facebook behind them.