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.
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.
Facebook shut off Twitter's access to friends the same day it launched:<p><a href="http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-friends/" rel="nofollow">http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-fr...</a>
Anyone else think <a href="http://join.app.net/" rel="nofollow">http://join.app.net/</a> should introduce some lower donation tiers?<p>Like
"$10 — You give a shit about this"
"$25 — You give a shit about this and you want a t-shirt"
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).<p>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.<p>I think this is going to leave a myriad of mainstream users disenchanted by Twitter locking them out of their friends list.<p>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.<p>Thoughts? Keep the conversation going on Twitter: @raja
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.
> <i>The decision is especially perplexing [because] Jack Dorsey is also an investor in Instagram and the two companies share Benchmark as an investor.</i><p>Shouldn't those be past tense? Did either of them maintain a connection to Instagram post-sale to Facebook?
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.
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.
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.<p>Why aren't they rolling out their own "Find my twitter friends"?
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.