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An older version of Twitters home page emphasized following your interests.

Facebook disabled Instagrams photo integration with Twitter such that Instagram photos are no longer viewable within tweets and users are now redirected to Instagram to view Instagram photos through a link within a tweet. As a result, our users may be less likely to click on links to Instagram photos in tweets, and Instagram users may be less likely to tweet or remain active users of Twitter. Any similar elimination of integration with Twitter in the future, whether by Facebook or others, may adversely impact our business and operating results.

Twitter and Instagram dont play nice for that very reason. In ct, they dont play at all. Lets let Twitters S-1 explain:

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Twitters monthly active users.

Heres how Twitter would like you to interpret that statement: The most important people in the world prefer Twitter. It has plenty of proof to back up that claim. You heard it first on Twitter, from the Iranian President himself no less, that Hassan Rouhani and President Barack Obama spoke on the phone in a historic call in late September, for instance.

To the casual observer, Twitter and Instagram appear to be worlds apart. One is for following whats happening right now. The other is for sharing pictures. But the two social apps share something so essential that it has changed them from friends to foes: For their services to flourish, they both need celebs.

Or, as social networks like to call them, influential users -- and the battle for them is critical as both Instagram and Twitter try to turn their popular apps into money-, ad-filled playgrounds.

The side-by-side rise of Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and others, all while Facebook has continued to grow in size and attention, attest that variety can be the spice of our social lives.

People jump in and out of apps all the time, Brian Blau, a Gartner analyst, said. They can be Instagram users and Twitter users and be full participants in both of those kinds of conversations. So I dont think that one excludes the other.

As Instagram gets bigger, Twitters pitch about being one-of-a-kind lls flat. Twitter has already said theres a pSocial Networking Why Twitters most important asset is at riskroblem.

That Instagram is growing at a ster clip isnt on its a ce a huge problem for Twitter. In the world of social apps, people dont have to pick just one.

Jennifer Van GroveJennifer Van Grove covers the social beat for CNET. She loves Boo the dog, CrossFit, and eating vegan. Her jokes are often in poor taste, but her articles are not.

Accounts such as these lure people back for more 140-character bits. They are the essence of Twitter, a key reason to visit it at all. But of equal importance is what you reveal when you connect to them, or they to you. Herein lies the special sauce that makes Twitter of value to advertisers: the Interest Graph.

Now at 150 million active users, the 3-year-old photo-sharing app is quickly closing in on Twitters 218 million active users. Instagram grew 66 percent between January and September, adding 60 million active users in that time. Thats more than twice as much as Twitter grew in the nine-month period between September 2012 and June 2013.

Twitter is loved by mous people -- something its counting on to keep driving its business as an unsuspecting rival grows up.

Or as Blau put it, To some degree, Twitter and social is a big grand experiment.

This is where Instagram comes in. Its a ster-growing social app, has a follower model akin to Twitters,new york asian escort and counts many celebrities and other influencers as users. Its owner, Facebook, also has a war chest of data linked to peoples real identities, all of which could lead to a more interesting Interest Graph for advertisers.

Real time is also Twitters game to lose. Though Facebook and Instagram love to remind us how relevant they are to current afirs and breaking news, Twitter, at least when it comes to perception, has cornered the market for now. But exactly how big the market is for letting advertisers ride the wave of public chatter is a variable unknown.

The graph is valuable to advertisers, which, ultimately, will determine how well Twitter does as a stock. Twitter, like Facebook, is an ad business; 87 percent of its revenue came from advertising in the first half of 2013.

Thats its map of all the people, connections, and interactions on Twitter. In official, investor-speak, Twitters Interest Graph, previously referred to as its follow graph,Social Networking maps, among other things, interests based on users followed and actions taken on our platform, such as tweets created and engagement with tweets, according to the S-1.

This issue isnt audience -- until advertising comes into play. Instagram is set to turn on ads for US users in the coming weeks, in the form of sponsored photo and video updates to the home feed. Twitter and Instagram will be battle for advertising dollars, Blau said.

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest -- heck, even Viddy -- have influencers. But Twitter deems itself top dog with this bunch. The public, real-time nature, and tremendous global reach of our platform make it the content distribution platform of choice for many of the worlds most influential individuals and organizations, Twitter said in its S-1, filed earlier this month with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A bigger, ad-supported Instagram threatens to erode the value of Twitters greatest asset.

How well a person or brand can distribute information and attract newcomers -- the most important kinds of influence to Twitter -- matters. Twitter surely measures and monitors such things closely. We know the company maintains an internal metric for scoring member influence, something co-founder, largest shareholder, and former CEO Evan Williams revealed back in 2010.

If theres one area where Twitter may have partial immunity, its in the TV arena. Twitter has been pushing with all its might to deepen its link to television. It recently kicked off remote-control tie-ins with Comcast and an ad-sharing deal with the NFL. The Comcast deal in particular gives Twitter a way to stand out with broadcasters and media companies wanting data on how influencers directly affect tune-in.

We understand that theres great value associated with Twitters follow graph data. Thats what Twitter said last July when it crippled Instagrams ability to let members find and follow their Twitter friends on Instagram. Twitter was so afraid of handing over its relationships, its graph, to a rival that it took what was perceived at the time as a pretty drastic action.

As Twitter said: We believe a users Interest Graph produces a clear and real-time signal of a users interests, greatly enhancing the relevance of the ads we can display for users and enhancing our targeting capabilities for advertisers.

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