"Vine’s Access to Facebook Blocked"

Facebook Vine

Just a few days after its launch, Twitter’s six-second video app called Vine has been met with several obstacles. While Vine has been working on its bugs, such as people signing into other users’ accounts, there is one thing it cannot fix: the app has been blocked from Facebook.

Several users have discovered that they cannot add their Facebook friends who have Vine accounts. Instead, a dialog box appears informing them that “Vine is not authorized to make this Facebook request.” The blockage took users by surprise because it happened hours after Vine’s launch and the request worked beforehand.

In a somewhat reaction to the situation, Facebook executive Justin Osofsky explained the issue without directly referencing Vine. He instead pointed to violations in Facebook’s Platform Policy.

“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 (see I.10),” wrote Osofsky, Facebook’s director of platform partnerships and operations.

Osofsky referred to a portion of Facebook’s Platform Policy, which states:

Reciprocity and Replicating core functionality: (a) Reciprocity: Facebook Platform enables developers to build personalized, social experiences via the Graph API and related APIs. 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. (b) Replicating core functionality: 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.

In layman’s terms, Facebook blocks third-party apps that gather FB’s data but does not share their data back to FB. In defense, Vine insists that their users can share their six-second video clips to Facebook, as well as on Twitter and the Vine feed.

Reboerto Baldwin of Wired, meanwhile, wrote that the real reason behind Facebook blocking Vine could be on how the social media giant sees Vine as using Facebook users to “bootstrap their growth.”

Source: Facebook Developers, via Wired