Facebook, Twitter, Stop Fighting!


Guys, please. I know you've got serious differences, but you still love us users, right? Right?

A Cold War has been brewing between the two major social media services for the better part of a year — and it heated up Friday. That's when Facebook effectively sent Twitter a little passive-agressive note about why it was blocking access to the Facebook Friends list on Twitter's Vine app.

The blog post in question never mentioned Twitter or Vine by name. But Facebook did respond to Mashable's request for a comment on the Vine blockage by simply forwarding the post to us.

There's no doubt who it refers to when it calls out "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."

Seriously, Facebook? That's like leaving a Post-it on the fridge talking about "whoever keeps drinking the last of the milk" when there's only one other person in the house. Then putting the milk in a locked cabinet. Then photocopying the note and sending it to all your roommate's friends.

Twitter is hardly blameless, of course. Indeed, there's a case to be made that, yes, "they started it" — by disallowing Instagram's access to the list of folks you're following on Twitter last July, shortly after Facebook's purchase of Instagram was finalized.

Boy, I bet Twitter wishes they could take that back now. They've gotten as good as they gave, first when Instagram stopped supporting Twitter cards — so you couldn't see Instagram pics within your Twitter feed any more — and now again with the whole Vine blockage. This is a textbook definition of conflict escalation.

Most of us, even those who are paid to cover this stuff, don't care who started it. We don't care about your competing business models. We simply want any app we use that is owned by either of you to interact seamlessly, the way they used to. We'd just really like to see our Vine videos on Facebook and our Instagram snaps on Twitter. You're linking to them anyway; why not go that one extra step, delight your users, and raise the tenor of the whole social media experience?

Yeah, I know, you're kind of competitors now on the photo-sharing front. But is that really worth throwing out the baby with the bathwater here? You have a long history of cooperation and interactivity, allowing Facebook posts to appear on Twitter and vice versa.

You have hundreds of employees who could be sitting down every day to resolve your differences. You have hundreds of millions of users who know how great social media can be when everything just works. There are expectations of a golden age. The whole planet is watching. Let's get to it.

Report by : Chris Taylor

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