

Twitter Shuts Off “Find Friends” Feature For Instagram - arturogarrido
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/26/no-api-for-you-twitter-shuts-off-find-friends-feature-for-instagram/

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therealarmen
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.

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landr0id
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.

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_pius
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.

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

[http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-
fr...](http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-friends/)

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tpowell
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"

~~~
MatthewPhillips
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.

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raja
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

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cube13
The real reason? Twitter doesn't want Facebook to have direct access to their
social networking lists.

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bluetidepro
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.

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bithive123
Let's hope Facebook follows suit!

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crazygringo
> _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?

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

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

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

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jsilence
Thats why we need protocols and not APIs.

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killyourheros
Can you explain this a little more please?

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jsilence
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.

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

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

Are you annoyed enough to pay money for this?

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smashing
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?

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drivebyacct2
... what?

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nchlswu
This is absolutely crazy.

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

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alexlande
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.

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k-mcgrady
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.

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

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GuiA
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"?

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abraham
That is what Twitter shut off.

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

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abraham
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.

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GuiA
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.

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abraham
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.

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nhangen
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.

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Ralith
Like <http://identi.ca/> ?

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

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

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wyclif
The dream of the Internet is dying.

