The Instagram-ification of Twitter

At the core of Twitter's success is the idea that you have to work within very specific and confining parameters. This brutal efficiency manifests itself in a couple ways: The use of hashtags as a sock drawer for organizing conversations, or the 140-character limit that, let's remember, used to be words only.

Now, as Twitter approaches an initial public offering, the platform is embarking on a striking overhaul that will literally expand every tweet. Starting today, timelines on Twitter will be "more visual and more engaging," as the company put it in a blog post, on both Twitter.com and in its official iOS and Android apps.

Instead of hiding embedded images in clickable links, photos and videos from Vine will be auto-expanded in a timeline. Tapping on that photo or video will cause it to occupy your whole screen.

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To Instagram and Facebook users, the layout should look familiar. Call it the Instagram-ification of Twitter.

As investors enter the picture, it appears Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are all striving toward a single ideal, borrowing heavily from one another along the way.

In Twitter's case, the move shows that it's serious about adopting a platform that's easy to sell to advertisers. Twitter is saying: Look! We also have pretty pictures that don't look out of place! Users won't just ignore your ads like they would banner ads!

The writing has been on the wall for a while. Instagram just a few days ago revealed that native ads would begin popping into people's streams this week. (And no one is complaining so far, so...success?) And Facebook's revenue is forecasted to surge 51 percent for this quarter from a year ago, mostly due to a striking new photo-oriented News Feed overhaul.

The lesson for the attention economy being that images pack more of a punch than words, especially when it comes to advertising dollars. More visual everything. #Brands get more to work with.

Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook may all serve different purposes, but the road to profitability is paved more or less the same.