Facebook is sending a clear message to Twitter on Friday: Don’t steal Instagram’s thunder.
Fewer than 24 hours removed from Twitter’s launch of video sharping app Vine, Facebook has curtailed the application’s “find people” button, which used to allow members to connect to their Facebook contacts.
As of Friday morning, Vine is “not authorized” to make the Facebook request. For now, neither Twitter or Facebook has commented on the issue, but the growing tension between the two social networking giants is, indeed, palpable.
All told, it’s a real-life war that’s been brewing since Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram.
“At the end of last year,” write Richard Holt and Shane Richmond of The Telegraph, “Instagram, the Facebook-owned photo sharing app, disabled the feature that allowed Twitter to properly display its photos, in a sign of growing tensions between the two platforms… This meant that Twitter users were forced to click through to the Instagram site if they wanted to see photos in their entirety.”
With social networks becoming “increasingly protective of their platforms” across a vastly more competitive landscape, it’s unlikely we will ever see again the type of peaceful cohabitation that was once possible in the world of social networking.
In other words, if you think Twitter and Facebook’s inability to play nicely is bad, there’s an excellent chance that we haven’t really seen anything yet.
