Is Twitter closing down their open API infrastructure to make competitive moves against threats? That certainly seems like a possibility after disavowing much of their relationship with LinkedIn recently and now by blocking Instagram users from pulling their Twitter friends into the photo sharing app that Facebook bought.

API integration is what makes many services function. Facebook has been known to block API calls (even from Twitter itself) and Google is famously slow to roll out their own API integrations, including limited access to their own social network, Google+. It’s unclear what Twitter is trying to accomplish with these moves, but it would appear that they are starting to play hardball with their own popularity.

According to Techcrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis:

Twitter’s agenda here isn’t at all clear, but one possibility is that it wants to control the photos experience on its platform (and preclude Facebook from doing the same). Selectively limiting API access by company is definitely strange behavior in an ecosystem that thrives on API symbiosis. Imagine if Google just decided to shut off Google Maps access to apps randomly?

If there is no valid reason other than trying to keep competitors down, then this is the type of move that could easily backfire on Twitter.