Following controversy regarding Facebook's apparent decision to block Twitter's new Vine application from accessing the social network's database to find friends, the company announced revised partnership policies on Friday.
Facebook doesn't specifically mention Vine anywhere, opting only to state that it's "clarifying" its platform policies after questions were raised, but it's hard to read the development as anything but a response to the controversy.
The new video-sharing app Vine was launched on Thursday after officially confirming that Twitter had purchased the company and integrated it into its micro-blogging network. The app featured the ability to find friends through both Twitter and Facebook, but Facebook blocked this option only a few hours after it was available.
First things first, though: the policy update. Writing on the social network's developer blog, Facebook's Director of Platform Partnerships and Operations Justin Osofsky said that for the bulk of developers, nothing has changed. According to Osofsky, the changes only really affect app makers trying to rush success by piggybacking off of Facebook.
"For the vast majority of developers building social apps and games, keep doing what you're doing," wrote the social network's Director of Platform Partnerships and Operations Justin Osofsky. "Our goal is to provide a platform that gives people an easy way to login to your apps, create personalized and social experiences, and easily share what they're doing in your apps with people on Facebook."
"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."
Furthermore, the actual policy now reads:
"Facebook Platform enables developers to build personalized, social experiences via the Graph API and related APIs," read Facebook's updated policy. "If you use any Facebook APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook."
Now we have two examples illustrating that Facebook's chief complaint is the fact that some app developers don't allow their uses to "share back" their creations on Facebook itself. The thing is, Vine doesn't even qualify as such an app. Ever since the service launched, it made it easy for users to share their videos on both Facebook and Twitter. Multiple Facebook members even pointed this out directly in the comments section of the company's blog post.
So what's the deal? Honestly, it might be as simple as Facebook not wanting to share its social graph with Vine, now a competing service offered by a chief rival. The new policy continues with:
"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."
Facebook is certainly within its rights to refuse access to its enormous database, but to couch the denial with claims that apps don't provide adequate sharing options doesn't seem to be the smartest course considering Vine's widely-publicized debut and Facebook-sharing abilities. Going even further, Facebook said that if it revokes access to its social graph for any reason, app developers must delete all the information they received beforehand. Since Vine was successfully connecting to Facebook in the hours following launch, it's unclear whether or not it'll have to give up that information. The only way to really keep it is to receive consent from the users themselves.
Considering the past skirmishes between Facebook and Twitter, this latest development with Vine isn't that surprising, though it is another way to limit users from sharing things online, be it pictures, videos, or simple comments. Functionality between Twitter and Instagram has already been limited every since the photo-sharing service was acquired by Facebook, and it doesn't seem like the immediate future is going to see a friendlier relationship between the social networks.
