Twitter Blocks Facebook Friends Link

Twitter yesterday made it possible for its 190 million-plus users to find and follow Facebook friends that also use the microblog service.

The company, satisfying a heavily requested feature, upgraded its Facebook application to show Twitter users what Facebook friends of thiers are on Twitter.

Users can then save them to a Twitter List and post tweets to a Facebook profile and Facebook Pages.

Best intentions blocked

One small problem though: the new functionality isn’t working. Twitter product manager, Josh Elman noted at 6:15 PDT, 23 June, that: “The Facebook app cannot currently access your Facebook friend list. We believe this is an issue on Facebook’s end.”

A Twitter spokesperson told eWEEK today: “Facebook has notified us that they have blocked the update to our application, and we are working on a resolution with them.”

Facebook did not respond to eWEEK‘s request for comment about the blocked functionality.

Ideally, this functionality would promote link, photo and general content sharing between the leading microblog service and the leading social network, both of which have millions of users in common.

Facilitating additional sharing between the networks can increase exposure of people and contacts to more people, which is what any social service desires.

No such integration issues exist between Twitter and LinkedIn, whose 70 million users got the Twitter treatment last November.

Thanks to the Tweets application from LinkedIn, users can see which of their LinkedIn connections are on Twitter and follow them from the app.

The app also lets users save their LinkedIn connections as a list, post tweets to LinkedIn, and add their Twitter account to their LinkedIn profile.