Tracking down your Twitter buddies among Instagram's 80 million users is now tougher than ever — because the photo-sharing service's "Find Your Friends" feature is kaput. And Twitter appears to be at fault.
As TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis reports, the "Find Your Friends" feature — which is buried within your Instagram app's settings — is now useless "due to API restrictions from Twitter's end."
In plain terms? In order to find your Twitter friends, Instagram needed to snag some data from Twitter. And for some reason, Twitter decided to change the locks.
In fact, if you stubbornly do try to find your Twitter friends on Instagram right now, a little pop-up message will offer that very same explanation:
Unable to Find Friends Twitter no longer allows its users to access this information in Instagram via the Twitter API. We apologize for any inconvenience.
We reached out to Twitter to see if the social network had anything to say about this change — which is pretty darn awkward if you consider that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey happens to be an Instagram investor — but we have not heard back yet. We will update once we do.
In the meantime, we'll just point out that this isn't the first time something like this has happened. As Tsotsis recalls, "Facebook has done similar to Twitter in past years. For example, it blocked Twitter’s access to Facebook’s in-app friend finder feature in June of 2010."
Amusingly, Instagram was recently acquired by Facebook. Guess what goes around comes around.
Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.