We hope you weren't planning to find your Twitter friends outside of Twitter because pretty soon it will likely be impossible to do so.
Twitter has slowly but surely been cutting out major third-party sites, preventing then from offering a "Find Twitter Friends" search feature.
The latest third-party site to lose access to your Twitter contacts is, as Buzzfeed's Matt Buchanan first noted, hosted blogging service Tumblr. Previously Twitter has cut off LinkedIn and, more recently, photo-sharing site Instagram.
Tumblr still offers a way to find your friends on the service by searching either Gmail contacts or Facebook friends.
Earlier this month Twitter put third-party application developers on notice, saying that the social network arguably built on the backs of third-party developers no longer needs them. Twitter has also been cutting off third-party social networks like Tumblr, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Twitter's API rules aren't entirely clear, but the company's overall position seems to be that developers – including big third-party sites like Tumblr – should be putting their content into Twitter, but not taking anything back out.
That stance, along with the user limits on third-party client software, has soured many developers on Twitter. Thus far though there doesn't seem to be a mass exodus of angry developers abandoning Twitter. That may simply be because, at the moment, there's nowhere else to go, though, as always, the open web offers a solution.
