Nick Bilton’s right. Here come the photo wars.

On Wednesday Instagram disabled the ability for Instagram photos to properly display in Twitter Cards. Mathew explains:

“What Instagram has done is to remove support for the expanded view of tweets that shows up on the Twitter website and in its official apps. These tweets have a special pane that displays excerpts from blog posts and news stories published by certain partners, or photos and videos from certain external services. Twitter originally launched this as something called ‘expanded tweets’ but it has since become a much more ambitious platform called “Twitter Cards.‘”

No doubt Twitter brought this upon itself, taking aggressive measures as it has over the past year to start to reign in ownership of third-party apps and cutting off Instagram’s access to the Twitter follow graph. Of course, that Instagram used the Twitter acquisition offer as leverage in its negotiations with Facebook didn’t help the relationship between the two companies.

So what’s the bottom line? In short, this war will continue to escalate, further closing the door on the era of open social as the larger social nets look to retain value so that they can better monetize. Instagram took this action only after it had finally launched a true web presence (a missing piece without which web monetization was practically impossible). The move by Instagram will also force Twitter to accelerate its own photo-filters offering, which I think will be the foundation of a Twitter effort to encourage users to increasingly use the real-time social net as their primary photo-sharing app.