In a desperate bid to keep its head above the same social media mass grave where LiveJournal, GeoCities and MySpace have carved a warm, comfortable niche in the dirt, Twitter is reportedly about to unveil updates to its mobile application that will include photo filters and video editing capabilities allowing its users to bypass third party apps like the ugly duckings turned beautiful cashed up swans of social networking and porn, Instagram and YouTube.
According to the New York Times tech blog Bits, Twitter aims to introduce smartphone camera filter features into their official mobile app, from which most of its billion daily missives about Instagram and brunch are issued. The microblogging site was reportedly spurred on by Facebook’s high-profile acquisition of Instagram, which received a lot of publicity for its Dr. Evil amounts of cash and the high level of pinkie-to-pout finger pointing involved. Twitter CEOs Dick Costolo and Jack Dorsey allegedly went on what I imagine would be a hilarious nation-wide road trip to acquire the third party photography app that would eventually go on to become American’s Next Top Twitter Filter, but decided that it would be more cost effective and fun to do it themselves. They live-tweeted the whole thing under the hashtag #Dick&JacksExcellentAdventure before crushing the dreams of many a trailer-park born mid-Western app who dreamed of making it in the big city. A David Fincher film is in the works.
Sources at Twitter – who spoke under conditions of anonymity for fear of Tippi Hedren-style retribution* – said the introduction of filters would make the company’s V.I.T.’s (Very Important Tweeters, which are a thing) “especially happy” at the thought of having to bypass Instagram next time they want to accidentally post a dick/boob pic with a Valencia overlay and carefully placed tilt shift, because there is a lot of effort involved in making something so laboured over look effortless and sxc.
Cross promo! Follow us on Instagram @pedestriantv and Twitter @pedestriandaily. We’ll show you a #nofilter good time. We will not show you dick/boob pics, #SRY.
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