Facebook kicks Voxer off it’s platform after adding voice support to it’s own app |

The AllThingsD reports allegations that Facebook turned off the API for Voxer, an app for both iPhone and Android that is a virtual walkie-talkie. It allows you to talk one and one or in a group of people, got it’s Facebook access disabled. Voxer uses Facebook’s API to find friends who are already on Voxer. You can still add friends by username, so this isn’t going to kill their whole product.

According to CEO Tom Katis of Voxer, Facebook emailed the company wanting to hold a phone conference with them to discuss why Facebook killed its API access. This news comes out days after Facebook added voice calling to it’s messager app. I wonder if Voxer friend finding service losing access to the Facebook API is related in any ways? I think it’s very possible, and if this story gets popular we might see a public statement from Facebook about this.

This incident is very similar to how Twitter disabled “Find Friends” on Instagram, after Facebook bought out Instagram for 1 billion dollars! Then after that Facebook disabled Twitter’s “card” feature that allowed previewing Instagram images on Twitter, forcing users to view images on Instagram’s website. Then a few days after that, Twitter added filters to its own mobile apps similar to Instagram’s. So in previous cases both major social networks, Facebook and Twitter have disabled access to competitors products, so it’s not unheard of this happening.

Sadly I hate how these companies don’t want to play together. I view less images on Instagram because of it, viewing images inline is quicker and convenient. I’m one of those folks that views each image I see posted in my Twitter feed. Instatgram images still shows up in Facebook’s news feed, and rumors that Facebook will add Instagram images to it’s new graph search eventually. So seems like Facebook wants to keep Instagram and it’s data all to its self.

Do you wish companies products would play nicer together?

Source: AllThingsD