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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 99.1 ms ] threadAn 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.
Are you annoyed enough to pay money for this?
Shouldn't those be past tense? Did either of them maintain a connection to Instagram post-sale to Facebook?
Like "$10 — You give a shit about this" "$25 — You give a shit about this and you want a t-shirt"
I'm guessing a pictures product is down the pipe...
That's a bizarre reason to be against an open-source competitor.
Why aren't they rolling out their own "Find my twitter friends"?
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
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-fr...