While Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey invested in Instagram before its acquisition by Facebook, his company is now playing hardball with the popular social network.
“Twitter has blocked Instagram from using its API to find new friends to follow on the photo-sharing service,” reports Business Insider. “The news comes after Instagram announced on its blog that it hit 80 million users.”
The move marks the second time Twitter has blocked API access to a social network, after it recently ended its two-and-a-half-year partnership with LinkedIn by no longer allowing users to publish tweets to their LinkedIn profiles.
The “Find Your Friends” feature on Twitter has been removed, a helpful feature that enabled users to follow the same people they follow on Twitter via Instagram. However, the “Tweet Photo” feature is still available.
“We’ve learned that the feature is missing due to API restrictions from Twitter’s end, restrictions that possibly came about over concerns about Instagram’s scale and its strain on data pulls,” notes TechCrunch in a related post. “Many social apps like The Fancy and Foursquare still have access to this part of the Twitter API — it seems very likely that Instagram was the largest developer using the Twitter Friend Graph.”
“Twitter’s agenda here isn’t at all clear, but one possibility is that it wants to control the photos experience on its platform (and preclude Facebook from doing the same),” notes TechCrunch. “Selectively limiting API access by company is definitely strange behavior in an ecosystem that thrives on API symbiosis. Imagine if Google just decided to shut off Google Maps access to apps randomly?”
While Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey invested in Instagram before its acquisition by Facebook, his company is now playing hardball with the popular social network.
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