As Twitter has updated its Android and iOS apps with a new photo-filtering feature, imitating the functionality of Facebook-owned Instagram, the battle between the two social media giants has escalated.

Photo: Twitter’s photo filters on iPhone

Facebook, who bought the photo editing service for $715m this year, a few days earlier Twitter’s new release, banned a possibility for users to display Instagram photos in Twitter status updates. Instead, on Monday Twitter introduced its own photo-editing feature developed by Aviary, a New-York based tech company, which specialized in software development for photo-sharing platforms like Flickr. So, now Twitter users can apply eight color filters, compare different color schemes, crop and pinch as well as auto-enhance images for a better photo-sharing experience.

Moreover, today the brand has unveiled its unique summary of what has been hot throughout 2012 — 2012.twitter.com. Golden tweets, some of the biggest conversations, #onlyontwitter things, top trends, new voices and even your Personal Tweeing 2012 year is available for review as of today.

Watch the video for more details: