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