Twitter Shuts Off “Find Friends” Feature For Instagram | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Shuts Off “Find Friends” Feature For Instagram

techcrunch.com

64 pointsarturogarrido44 comments

This is almost certainly a strategic move on Twitter's part to slow the spread of Instagram. I doubt it has to do with "developers" as others have surmised. Even if it hurts Twitter's growth in the short term, in the long term it makes more sense to keep API access on for competitor photo-sharing apps and turn it off for Instagram (which is now a direct competitor). If Twitter buys Instagram, this sort of thing doesn't happen.

I'd actually love to have seen Instagram been acquired by Twitter instead of Facebook (if any acquisition had to happen). For me, I don't really use Facebook much anymore except for the occasional sharing of photos, and for everything else I use Twitter. Most status updates I see on Facebook now are about the length of a tweet, I'm not involved in any groups, don't "like" any pages; it all pretty much comes down to photos and text.

Even if there are legitimate reasons behind incidents like these, it's problematic for Twitter that there essentially hasn't been a positive story about the Twitter API since summer of 2010. And there have been a lot of stories about the Twitter API since then.

Facebook shut off Twitter's access to friends the same day it launched:

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-fr...

Anyone else think http://join.app.net/ should introduce some lower donation tiers?

Like "$10 — You give a shit about this" "$25 — You give a shit about this and you want a t-shirt"

I signed up a couple of days ago where it was around $85k and it's only at $89k now. Won't be meeting the goal at this pace, some lower tiers is probably a good idea. Or maybe a terrible one.

A onetime sponsorship would sort of defeat the point of having members that use and sustain the service though.

I'd love to hear commentary from Twitter or Instagram on the rationale for this. I don't think it's very plausible that this is due to 'strain' on Twitter's infrastructure as the Techcrunch article alludes. If API call volume was really the cause for Twitter blocking the API call, I'm sure Instagram would have been happy to throttle the volume of such API calls by limiting the amount of Twitter friend searches over a period of time (ex: you can only find new friends once/week).

It all seems very counterintuitive and you think that Twitter would be encouraging content creation and engagement on their platform as it creates defensibility for the service. Consider this: Twitter probably is positioned to spot emerging trends faster than any other service by being able to mine emergent links, etc.

I think this is going to leave a myriad of mainstream users disenchanted by Twitter locking them out of their friends list.

I signed up to Twitter very early (user id ~5000) and have been enamoured by it's growth and how it's established itself as the preeminent destination for open conversation and realtime search/discovery. There are a lot of smart people at the helm of Twitter and I have faith that they'll realize their mistake and fix it. Otherwise the conversation will go elsewhere and it would be a shame to see all that value dissipate.

Thoughts? Keep the conversation going on Twitter: @raja

The real reason? Twitter doesn't want Facebook to have direct access to their social networking lists.

Wow, I can't believe Twitter would alienate their API developers by shutting this feature off. Very soon, there will be no point in even integrating your app or site with Twitter.

Let's hope Facebook follows suit!

I guess it's just because of Facebook - but still, that really sucks.

It's just shutoff to Instagram.

> The decision is especially perplexing [because] Jack Dorsey is also an investor in Instagram and the two companies share Benchmark as an investor.

Shouldn't those be past tense? Did either of them maintain a connection to Instagram post-sale to Facebook?

The deal hasn't closed yet as far as we know.

The deal hasn't closed as of Facebook's investor's call today

Wow - looks like pretty soon there wont be any bridges between ecosystems.

Just ashes.

Thats why we need protocols and not APIs.

Can you explain this a little more please?

Email has imap/pop3 and smtp, the web has http etc.

If you use an API, you are bound to the decisions of the one single entity that is making the API available.

An open protocol on the other hand can be implemented by anyone who is willing to provide the service.

An API is an indicator for a walled garden. In this case two walled gardens are fighting for their share of the pie.

Instead of Twitter we should be using status.net, running our own instances of it. Decentralized just like email.

I always found it annoying I couldn't discover my facebook friends twitter accounts. This seems in line with the above.

"... I always found it annoying I couldn't discover my facebook friends twitter accounts. ..."

Are you annoyed enough to pay money for this?

Woah! Let's not get crazy here and start requesting compensation for our time. Capitalism would break out, and where would our national recession be then?

... what?

This is absolutely crazy.

I'm guessing a pictures product is down the pipe...

Annoying, and it will probably work. I've never followed anyone on instagram that I wasn't following on twitter, and if the option wasn't available I wouldn't have bothered.

It makes complete sense. Having the 'find friends' feature as an open API enabled Instagram to instantly build a network for you. If they didn't have this feature from the start things might have turned out very different. The only people I ever followed on Instagram were people I followed on Twitter.

Reminds me of when Apple's Ping had an option to bring in friends from Facebook, which quickly disappeared.

You can still access the list of a person's followers through Twitter's API, and Instagram has twitter-handle to instagram-handle mappings in their DB.

Why aren't they rolling out their own "Find my twitter friends"?

That is what Twitter shut off.

Twitter has shut off accessing the list of people a person follows?

That is how you would build the feature. Instagram gets a list of the Twitter accounts I follow, and looks to see if any of them already have an account.

Oh ok, I thought there was a more complex feature of the Twitter API. Getting the list of people a given user follows is such a basic API feature that I was genuinely surprised Twitter would disable it for Instagram.

My guess is Twitter doesn't want Facebook to have access to their friend graph and Facebook did the same thing to them a while ago.

This space is officially ripe for disruption. I was against an open-source version of Twitter because I really respected the brand and its tech....but now I'm not so sure. Would love to work on a replacement.

Like http://identi.ca/ ?

Looks neat, but I don't see that it is open source.

It is. Being open source was always their selling point. http://identi.ca/doc/source

or https://rstat.us/ :)

> I was against an open-source version of Twitter because I really respected the brand and its tech

That's a bizarre reason to be against an open-source competitor.

How so? I thought they were doing a decent job of developing the product, and wanted to support a for-profit business. In many ways, they made APIs sexy. It's just a shame that they've become a monster.

The dream of the Internet is dying.

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