Facebook is the first company to gain observer status with GNI, whose corporate members include Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google. Photo: AFP/Leon Neal
Vine, a Twitter-owned start-up, enables users to post six-second embedded video clips on Twitter. The first video using the service, posted by Twitter boss Dick Costolo and
showing the preparation of a steak tartare, was posted on the site on January 23, and on January 25 the Vine application was launched on iOS.
In addition to enabling users to post videos, Vine also allows users to find, and follow, friends on the service. However, according to reports, it appears that Facebook has blocked the application, preventing people from using the social network to find other friends who are on Vine.
The apparent blocking of Vine by Facebook was first noticed by a reader of tech blog The Verge, which posted a picture on Twitter, aimed @Verge among others, showing a screenshot of his Vine application displaying the message "Vine is not authorized to make this Facebook request" when attempting to find Facebook friends using the service.
Following up the story, Mashable reports that users are "also currently unable to share videos from Vine on Facebook. While we did not receive an error message to this effect, videos shared from the app have still not appeared on our timeline."
However Mashable does also point out that Vine has been experiencing delays, so the inability to share videos between the social networks could be due to delays rather than Facebook's actively blocking this aspect of the application.
So far none of the parties involved have made a statement regarding this issue.
The war for internet users' attentions between Facebook and Twitter has been heating up over the past few months. The most recent battle concerned photo sharing between the two sites, with rumors circulating that Twitter is updating its own app to enable users to add photo filters after Facebook purchased Instagram.