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Ask HN: Rip out Twitter integration that uses find friends functionality?

1 points by sbauch ↗ HN
I'm about a week away from launching a project that depends pretty heavily on the social graph and your connections in it.

I have both facebook and twitter authentication, and for each the app hits the relevant APIs to find your friends who are also using my app.

I've definitely focused more on twitter integration, as I view the twitter identity as more lightweight and less invasive- given the choice I would always sign up for services with twitter over facebook.

But at this point, I'm seriously considering ripping twitter auth out entirely given their actions the past couple weeks with turning off the find friends functionality on tumblr and instagram.

I realize it's a huge longshot my app gets to the size of a tumblr or instagram, but the whole thing is pretty much predicated on the apps ability to connect you with your friends.

So, HN, would you remove 'find friends through twitter' functionality from an app before launch, or would you go forth with it and wait for twitter to shut you down? Is it a real concern that I may lose this functionality? Or do you see that as a great problem to have, i.e. got enough traction that twitter noticed?

3 comments

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YuriNiyazov
You are framing this as a matter of personal ethics, rather than a business decision, so it's difficult to answer your question. You feel that Twitter did Tumblr and Instagram wrong. I tend to think that taking sides between two giants is dumb - the giants won't notice, but you'll get hurt.

If I had already built the Twitter functionality in, I would not preemptively rip it out, I would wait for them to shut that functionality off. Then I would raise a huge stink about it, get the name of the service in the news and maybe capture some Internet good will.

If I hadn't built Twitter functionality, I wouldn't spend any resources on building it until after launch.

sbauch
To clarify, I'm certainly not approaching this from a personal ethics standpoint. It is I suppose a question of social service authentication elasticity. Will removing twitter at the outset significantly reduce my sign ups to the point that it would be smarter to deal with the repercussions of losing API access in the future? Or are most users not so sensitive to which service they use to sign up for something, such that if facebook is the only option, I can guarantee a consistent experience for all users going forward?
YuriNiyazov
As far as I can tell, the services in question didn't lose access to Twitter authentication, they just lost the ability to take the users' social graph out of Twitter