Twitter is to bring forward plans to release its own retro camera filters for photographs posted in tweets. It's a new stage in the ongoing battle with Instagram, which recently disabled Twitter cards integration, rendering its images from displaying correctly in a Twitter feed.

This then resulted in Twitter removing embedded Instagram pictures completely. "Instagram has disabled photo integration with Twitter. As a result, photos are no longer appearing in Tweets or user photo galleries," it said in a statement.

"While tweeting links to Instagram photos is still possible, you can no longer view the photos on Twitter, as was previously the case."

To make up for the shortfall, Twitter is seemingly rush releasing its own Instagram-like features. Over the weekend and on a day last week, chairman Jack Dorsey tweeted several pictures of colleagues, all in black and white and all using some form of retro filter - leading many to believe he was trying out the new Twitter service.

It is known that the new version of the Twitter app is in testing, so this could be a hint of what is to come. According to AllThingsDigital, however, Twitter has not responded to a request to comment, so we'll leave that for you to decide.

What we do know is, if the social networking site does manage to get its filters out in time for Christmas, it will gain users rapidly because the holiday period is traditionally the most active for Instagram.