Popular social media platform Facebook announced that it had deprecated its Publish action feature from its API. This feature earlier made it possible for apps to publish posts on Facebook as the logged-in user.
In an estimate provided by Facebook itself, approximately 60,000 apps logged onto the social media site would be impacted. And this includes Twitter too.
Twitter on learning that it would no longer be able to allow users to auto-post across Facebook, happened to take it rather gracefully. They tweeted out their take on this as: “We’ve learned that Tweets and Retweets will no longer automatically post to connected Facebook accounts due to a recent Facebook update. Don’t worry; you have other ways to share a tweet.”
Impact on end users
It means that a Twitter user, who had connected their Twitter account to a Facebook account that automatically shared their tweets and retweets on Facebook, will no longer be able to do that. This feature had come in handy to Twitter accounts that have a considerable amount of influence and would like to reach out to the audiences across Facebook also. All they had to do is fill in the tweet and schedule it for a certain day and time, and let Facebook do the rest. The next thing this Twitter account holder would see is their tweet has been shared on Facebook by itself, without having to do it manually.
This helped users to share tweets on Facebook at times when they thought or knew they would not be available. Content flow across Facebook could not be disrupted, courtesy this feature. The digital marketing industry found this feature to be a boon and was driving endless social media campaigns on the shoulders of this feature.
Clarification from Facebook
Confirmation came in on behalf of Facebook regarding the scrapping of this cross-platform auto-posting feature through their spokesperson who said that this update was a result of Facebook’s decision to deprecate the Publish actions permissions feature. They also acknowledge the impact it had on Twitter. According to Facebook, anyone who wants to have a Twitter account automatically posting out content on Facebook should not be disheartened just yet. There are Facebook share dialogs for web, iOS, and Android.
This update, however, did come in with a fair share of forewarning. Facebook first announced that it was deprecating Publish actions permissions in April this year. The social media company, with a recent controversial history, said that a few categories of developers with apps that had longer product life cycles were given extensions so that they had more time to update their software.
With the recent update in effect, which disallows users to share tweets and push out content in any other form on Facebook automatically, apps have not only lost the ability to share content freely, but a lot of apps have lost access to its API platform. This all is Facebook’s additional effort to clean up the site’s landscape, and to safeguard user’s data and privacy controls.
