Less than 24 hours after its release, the social video app Vine
has been denied access to Facebook friend lists.
It’s a trend which is on the rise. Until recently, almost any new app would give you the opportunity to find your friends on Twitter, Facebook or Google. That made it really easy to see if anyone you knew was using a new app or service.
But since Facebook bought Instagram, and Twitter decided to stop showing Instagram pictures or allowing access to their API, companies have started to lock each other out.
Michael Arrington wrote an excellent article about the logic behind this. In essence, building walls around social networks sounds good for businesses, but it’s really annoying for us users.
It’s now tougher to find friends using new services, which will make it harder for these companies to take off, and make our lives more dull. iOS app Vine, with it’s innovative 6-second-video making process, is a good example of an app I would like to see take off. It would be a shame if competition between Facebook and Twitter gets in the way.
UPDATE by Lewis [January 25, 2013 – 13:07 PST]
Facebook’s Justin Osofsky has took to Facebook’s developer blog to clarify exactly what’s going on with Facebook blocking Vine. Here’s what he said:
For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today.
The specific section that Osofsky is referring to in Facebook’s policy reads, “You may not use Facebook Platform to promote, or to export user data to, a product or service that replicates a core Facebook product or service without our permission.” This doesn’t make sense as Vine provided a way to share directly to Facebook. What makes more sense is that Facebook is upset that Twitter is moving user interaction off of Facebook by only providing a link to Vine, instead of sharing those video clips directly to Facebook.
Facebook updated its policy to make it more clear but it actually makes it more ambiguous. There are plenty of applications out there that tap into Facebook’s API for finding friends. There are also plenty of services that Facebook allows access to its API that duplicate Facebook functionality, like Foursquare. It seems, then, that either Facebook is about to release its own short-form video sharing service or that it just hates Twitter. Either way, it’s the users of Facebook, Vine, and Twitter that suffer.