Facebook Denies Twitter’s Friend Request

To a degree, it could be argued that Twitter is a social network. After all, Twitter is as ‘social’ as it gets. But there’s one crucial distinction, the asynchronous follow model, if you follow someone they don’t have to do the same.

That said, friends are a good thing to have even on Twitter, which is why a new feature introduced to the microblogging site’s Facebook application proves very interesting. It enables users to see which of their Facebook friends also have Twitter accounts and then lets them follow any of them or even add them to a list. That sounds great, except for one problem, Facebook has now blocked the app.

“Today, we're improving our Find Friends section to make it easier to find and follow the people you already know -- your friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn -- who use Twitter. Our Facebook app, which launched in 2007, now shows which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter and lets you follow them instantly and save them to a list,” Twitter announced initially.

The Twitter Facebook app enables you to republish your tweets on the social network. But, now, it can also help you connect with your friends from Facebook. The Twitter app will tell you which of them also use the app, which means that it’s not going to be a comprehensive way of finding all of your Twitter-using friends. Still, with about seven million users, the app is popular enough to be useful.

But those that were eager to try it out soon found that it didn’t work. Twitter provided an update: “the Facebook app cannot currently access your Facebook friend list. We believe this is an issue on Facebook's end.” It’s not clear if Facebook did this on purpose, but there are indications that this may be the case. Facebook has said that it is “working with Twitter to resolve the issue.” However, Twitter later replied that Facebook had blocked the app and that it was working with the social network to come to a solution.