Earlier this summer, I wrote about how various services do “people tagging”.
It’s a really great and important feature in social apps.
One of the things that has been painful is how Instagram uses @mentions as their people tagging system — just like Twitter. Because when you share the Instagram photo to Twitter, it can get messed up. For example, my friend @ryan has a different handle on Instagram.
When I wrote that post, a number of folks publicly & privately said to me there ain’t no way Instagram (owned by Facebook) was going to fix this problem. It simply wasn’t in their interest to help Twitter.
Well today Instagram announced (on Tumblr!) they fixed their @mentions translation with tweets. They put the user customer ahead of any corporate strategy option.
Great job @mikeyk and team!