A large part of Twitter's success has been through the integration of 3rd party suppliers via their API. In the early days Twitter was relaxed about how developers could interact with the API as they sought to grow the user base towards critical mass.
Of course with that relaxed approach came some applications that weren't really in keeping with how Twitter wanted users to experience the site. One of those it would seem is LinkedIn.
The move underlines a shift from Twitter towards controlling how users interact with the site more tightly. For the last few years users have been able to publish their tweets into their LinkedIn activity stream. It has never been a great integration as it prevented users from doing many of the things Twitter is known for. With new features such as expandable tweets being added recently this disparity has grown ever starker.
“Ultimately, we want to make sure that the Twitter experience is straightforward and easy to understand,” wrote Twitter consumer product lead Michael Sippey in a company blog post, “whether you’re on Twitter.com or elsewhere on the web.”
The move could damage LinkedIn quite considerably. In my experience many of the status updates made on LinkedIn are actually pulled in from Twitter. Without these the activity feed area of the site could become pretty sparse.
There is also the LinkedIn Today social news service. This was originally powered in part by Twitter, although LinkedIn assure users that this is no longer the case and the service won't be affected.
“Tweets have not been powering LinkedIn Today for some time,” a LinkedIn spokeswoman said.
LinkedIn could be the first of a series of major casualties as Twitter rein in developers.
“…we’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used,” Sippey wrote.
With Twitter having bought Tweetdeck recently, 3rd party platforms such as Hootsuite and Seismic may be next. Certainly interesting times.
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