Twitter Forces Tumblr to Remove Friend Find Option

By Cynthia Herbert :: 5:43 AM

Microblogging platform Tumblr is the latest social network to fall victim to Twitter’s increasingly hostile API requirements.

Tumblr confirmed late on Wednesday that the feature to find and follow your Twitter friends on Tumblr has been removed from the service. They issued the following statement:

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. 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.

Tumblr is not the only social network to run afoul of Twitter’s draconian regime change. Recently, similar friend find functionality was pulled from Instagram.

Twitter’s reasons are that it is trying to enforce a new stance on the use of Twitter data and how its API is implemented by third-party applications and services.

Developers across the industry are reacting negatively to Twitter’s actions – some calling them a form of bullying. Instapaper’s founder, Marco Arment, threatened to cut Twitter functionality out of his product entirely if Twitter pulls a similar move to limit Instapaper’s access to find Twitter friends.

“If Twitter cuts off Instapaper’s “find friends” access, I’ll probably remove all Twitter functionality. It’ll hurt, but it’ll feel right,” Arment Tweeted on Wednesday night.