If petty differences can be put aside, user experience will win. Something very interesting has happened, which most people probably won’t even notice. When users share an Instagram link on Twitter, a preview of the post will be shown in the tweet, which is a major shift from only displaying the URL of the Instagram link.

Instagram’s official Twitter handle has tweeted: “They said it would never happen…” Yes, it wouldn’t have happened had pizza and wine were not shared. Hang on, what’s happening here?

There’s an interesting story behind this simple announcement. There was a time — before Facebook (now Meta Platforms) entered the picture — when Instagram founder Kevin Systrom and his counterpart at Twitter, Jack Dorsey, were good friends and Twitter did allow this preview feature.

After Instagram launched in October 2010, it was very easy to share photos to Twitter. This was at a time when users posted photos on Twitter via third-party services like Photobucket. On a more personal level, Dorsey and Systrom knew each other and had worked together at Odeo. Naturally, there was mutual support when each of them came up with their platforms. After Instagram was formed, Dorsey often tweeted Instagram photos to his huge follower base, which found resonance in celebrities like Justin Bieber and Snoop Dogg. While Twitter benefited from the easy photo-sharing feature, Instagram grew its user base with help from a feature that allowed users find friends from Twitter on the app.

A cafeteria of the Twitter building in San Francisco pictured last year

Mark Zuckerberg enters the picture. In April 2012, Facebook (now Meta Platforms) bought Instagram. Twitter too wanted to buy the platform but Zuckerberg made big promises to help Systrom and co-founder Mike Krieger to scale the app without interference. Dorsey took it personally and stopped posting on Instagram and soon after, Twitter blocked Instagram’s access to its following graph.

Then one thing led to another and in July 2018, Zuckerberg took credit for Instagram’s success during an earnings call: “We believe Instagram has been able to use Facebook’s infrastructure to grow more than twice as quickly as it would have on its own.” Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger ultimately left.

But what about the “new” feature, which is actually old? Tech journalist Casey Newton, who is the founder and editor of Platformer, tweeted in March this year “Now do Instagram photos” while quoting a story about how you could watch YouTube videos from a tweet. Kayvon Beykpour, product lead at Twitter, replied: “We’d like to. Takes two to tango.” Newton then tagged Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, who replied with a GIF of a man dancing in a kitchen.

It appears that Beykpour and Mosseri ended up having pizza and wine in Bruce Falck’s backyard (Bruce is revenue product lead at Twitter). And here we are in November when the feature is online.

It’s important that Twitter and Instagram buried the hatchet — however small it was — because Meta Platforms has promised to build a world where companies are more integrated than what they are today.

“We’re constantly getting more natural ways to connect and communicate with each other. Through Facebook’s lifetime, we started off typing text into websites, and we got phones with cameras. So the Internet became more visual and mobile. And then, as connections got better, we now have a rich video which is more immersive as the main way that we share experiences,” Zuckerberg has said in a press briefing regarding his metaverse focus. He continues to invest in VR-related technology with Facebook Reality Lab division, which includes Oculus. The company is going to invest more than $10 billion this year in metaverse efforts, which includes both VR and AR. Meta Platforms plans to hire more than 10,000 people in Europe for the division.