Facebook cuts off friend-finding API access to Vine | Hacker News Reader

Facebook cuts off friend-finding API access to Vine

allthingsd.com

25 pointsericyan15 comments

I guess karma is a bitch. I have no sympathy for Twitter as they've pulled similar moves that have screwed over third party developers as well. What goes around, comes around and it's Twitter's turn to get a taste of their own medicine.

This isn't a deal breaker for me using Vine, I've found it to be a really fun application I think is going to take off. and definitely compete with Instagram.

Shrug. I don't usually take Facebook's side on things, but Twitter should expect this kind of response after shutting out third party developers themselves.

I say "booooooo!" not because I'm some user-first purest, but because I think this is just a bad idea. Facebook and Twitter DON'T need to be at war. They just don't. They're different, and they always will be.

Twitter deserves no sympathy, but I don't think Facebook needs to be doing this, with Instagram OR to Vine.

Side note, I weirdly got to use Vine in its pre-alpha testing 6 months ago because my friend used to work with the founder at their previous company. One day, when he was showing it to me, we noticed a new user (there were only like 12). His user name: "Jack".

The were acquired the next day. Just a fun side story.

They're not at war from a user-facing product sense, but they are completely at war from an advertising and brand promotion standpoint.

Each wants to make their own social platform more attractive for advertisers. Things like this affect that notion.

But I agree in that they certainly are being more aggressive towards each other.

They're more likely to help each other than hurt each other, but I think that's hard to see. They're competition is other advertising media, not each other. Their ads are getting them profitable, but if either ever hits on an ad model for social that works as well as adwords does for search, the other will copy it and they'll both benefit.

Hm, interesting perspective.

Out of curiosity what other media do you think is significantly competing with them? I mean besides Google.

I don't think Google is really competing with them, Google wins because they make TONS of money on ads when people are clearly actively trying to buy something. Those ads cost tons of money if you ever run such a campaign you'll see it.

They're competing with TV I think more than anything, the sort of "brand recognition" advertising that is more nebulous and hard to measure.

"My friend likes this brand" may annoy you, but it means something to me. When I've seen that in Facebook ads, I remember it. It may be years before that matters to my purchases, but that's how brands invest in TV advertising now, and if they can figure out to objectively show that Facebook advertising does that better, their ad spends will explode.

It's only that, because TV was the ONLY place for this for so long and therefore brands were able to measure the effect of this advertising other time, that TV ads were able to be proven to work, even for ads not directed at people literally looking to buy RIGHT NOW. Internet ads have had a problem proving their ROI in this regard, but if Facebook or Twitter figure this out, it's going to be huge.

OK, but even if FB takes 10% from Google it's enough to rain on their parade. I can see FB do a decent SE with Bing as backfill for what it cannot provide. If the search engine is decent (bing is OK for most people) and they emphasize the "Search" button, I can see a % of people not going to another site to search.

P.S. Most of the money Google makes is probably by making ads similar to content, hoping enough users can't tell. But we have no consumer protection in USA.

I've never 100% understood why these social networks were so integrated. It's normal to me now, but years ago the concept of facebook.com/twitter and twitter.com/facebook would scramble the business side of my mind. Especially when I think back to how solid of a line was drawn between Myspace and Facebook

I just downloaded Vine 10 minutes ago, and assumed this was a launch bug in their app.

My thoughts after seeing this: wow, what a cheap shot by FB and I feel for the Vine team getting caught in this crossfire (I gather it's still their small startup team inside of Twitter).

My guess is Twitter/Vine anticipated Facebook would likely block them, and built the feature in any way. If they didn't get blocked, gravy. If they did they gain some sympathy points (points they have been losing lately).

Not the first time, Facebook cuts off almost all APIs to Wechat. At one time Wechat even cannot use the access token to get user's id for login verification. Every API returns "data:[]".

Walled garden wars 2.0. Dont let anyone become a threat in any form. Instead they both should evolve to social service providers but they rather cut off each others arms.

And, again, the people they're really hurting are the users.

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