Change afoot at Twitter, tweets disappear from LinkedIn

If you’re on LinkedIn, you might have received an e-mail on Friday with the subject “Sharing on LinkedIn and Twitter”. While on the surface it might have appeared that this was a move by LinkedIn to get people starting conversations on their site, a look deeper reveals this change was instigated by Twitter and any benefits to LinkedIn are more of the “happy accident” kind.

LinkedIn users have been able to share their Twitter streams on their user profiles since 2009 and, up until a month or two ago, the Twitter experience had been largely unchanged since then. The announcement on Friday that Twitter content would no longer be shared on LinkedIn followed this posting on the Twitter Developers blog.

In the post Michael Sippey, Director of Consumer Products at Twitter, highlights that “developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.””. This is almost exactly what the LinkedIn app does, and what it has been permitted to do for many years.

Twitter has long since made it clear that it wants to control how developers use its API. As a user of Twitterrific, I myself have taken note of the number of times they’ve changed their authentication for third party apps and I could only assume that this was to get rid of developers who were not playing ball. In March 2011 they came out and told developers not to make Twitter clients that send and display tweets. This latest crackdown on API restrictions has developers unsettled as to what Twitter has planned for third party apps in the future.

Undoubtedly what has brought about this change is Twitter’s attempts to expand their advertising offering. With an IPO imminent Twitter needs to put their focus on monetisation. Expanded tweets or Twitter Cards, as they are now officially named, are particularly highlighted in Sippey’s post – though the fact that they are currently only available on the Twitter website and not on its mobile apps would be cause for concern.

Other clues can be taken from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s recent comments – “What you’ll see us do more and more as a platform is allow third parties to build into Twitter.”. This, of course, further puts the emphasis on creating/sharing content on Twitter rather than allowing it to go off site. Indeed their debut TV ad, showcasing sponsored hashtags using the #NASCAR example, underscored Twitter how focused the company is on the commercial side of its business, over user experience, at this point.

So where does this leave the user of third party Twitter apps? Well that’s hard to know. I have seen comments suggesting that Twitter need to be more clear about their intentions for their API – that if they want advertising served across all platforms they should just let developers develop with that in mind. So far they have not come out and said that.

Here at Grafton Media we’re big fans of Twitter and, as a digital focused agency, we recognise that Twitter needs to improve itself in terms of the options available for marketeers. However, in my mind, it is extremely important that this improvement should not come at the price of user experience, or they’ll see Tweeters fleeing as fast as they appeared.

Meanwhile, if you do still want to use LinkedIn in tandem with Twitter, have a look at this video from LinkedIn below.

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