14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is not done abusing all of the developers and companies that helped it become what it is today. It's now aiming its "I'm too cool for you" gun at Tumblr which has removed the find friends on Twitter functionality.
Not voluntary, mind you, Twitter doesn't want developers getting any value out of its API and it certainly doesn't want others to have access to its most valuable asset, the follow graph.
Tumblr is not happy, to say the least. It's even worse since Tumblr has actually been a close partner of Twitter, it generates hundreds of millions of tweets from users sharing their posts on the microblogging site.
It's also one of the first developers to use "Twitter Cards" i.e. additional data to tweets, for example the ability to see Tumblr images linked to in a tweet directly on Twitter.
"To our dismay, Twitter has restricted our users’ ability to 'Find Twitter Friends' on Tumblr. Given our history of embracing their platform, this is especially upsetting," Tumblr said.
"Our syndication feature is responsible for hundreds of millions of tweets, and we eagerly enabled Twitter Cards across 70 million blogs and 30 billion posts as one of Twitter's first partners," it also reported.
"While we're delighted by the response to our integrations with Facebook and Gmail, we are truly disappointed by Twitter's decision," it added.
Twitter didn't say anything this time around, but what could it say? It did the same to Instagram a little while back, after the photo app was acquired by Facebook. But that made some sense, Twitter and Facebook haven't exactly been best buds.
"We understand that there’s great value associated with Twitter’s follow graph data, and we can confirm that it is no longer available within Instagram," Twitter said at the time.
