On Thursday, Twitter officially announced that it released and purchased a new video-sharing service called Vine. The new app had quite the first day, marked by intense interest and a generally positive reception. So when it was blocked by Facebook only hours after it launched, it raised many eyebrows.
Although now owned by Twitter, Vine doesn't require users to open an account with the social media site. In fact, one of its selling points was that you could share videos and find your friends through Facebook, too. When the app launched, this feature worked seamlessly and with no problem; cut to a few hours later, however, and people began getting error messages:
"Vine is not authorized to make this Facebook request."
Granted, it hasn't been confirmed that Facebook is deliberately preventing Vine access to its network. And it's not like the video service didn't have other bugs to work through on its first day. At various points since its launch, users had some trouble finding friends through Twitter, and sometimes even found themselves accidentally signing in to other people's accounts.
If Facebook is blocking Vine (and it looks to be the case), it wouldn't be the first time that it has played rough with Twitter. After Facebook outbid its rival and purchased Instagram, the photo-sharing app cut off its integration of Twitter Cards, meaning that Twitter users could no longer embed photos in their tweets. In retaliation, Twitter then blocked Instagram's ability to find friends through its app, much like what seems to be happening now with Facebook and Vine.
Considering what happened with Instagram, then, it wouldn't be all that surprising if Vine was blocked from finding friends through Facebook. It would be yet another unpleasant roadblock that social media users have to deal with, which is bad enough on its own, but could foreshadow even more unfriendly behavior in the future.
People don't use only one social media service anymore; they have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ (don't laugh, some people use it! ahem... Okay, I'm not one of them) and more. So, the less integration they allow in order to protect their userbase, the less sharing actually gets done.
