Twitter’s new video-streaming app Twitter Vine has already incurred the wrath of Facebook less than one week into its tenure. But why, and how has Facebook’s stance changed for developers?
Vine, a video tool developed by Twitter after the micro-blogger bought out New York-based Vine Labs, has been blocked by Facebook less than one day after launch.
The reason: Vine allows its members to connect to their Facebook friends using the ‘find people’ function.
Or at least, it did.
Vine’s USP is that the videos streamed had a maximum six second run-time and were on a loop; not too dissimilar to GIFs. “Posts on Vine are about abbreviation,” explains Vine on its blog site. “They’re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They’re quirky, and we think that’s part of what makes them so special.”
Yet utilising Facebook technology for a company’s own ends is of course a no-no. A post on the Facebook Developer Blog exhorts: “For the vast majority of developers building social apps and games, keep doing what you’re doing.”
However it adds: “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.”
These modified policies, last changed on January 25, now contain the following: “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.”
No names are mentioned explicitly of course, but it’s apparent that Facebook is referring to Vine in the ‘much smaller number of apps’ category.
To those watching the social wars, this isn’t going to be a huge surprise, especially given how Facebook-owned Instagram removed support for viewing its photos within tweets.
Facebook’s App Center was launched in June in the US and rolled out globally a month later. But with these new guidelines for developers, who will win the social wars?
