Twitter cuts off service to LinkedIn, API changes draw ire

Twitter/LinkedIn

(CBS News) Twitter, the micro-blogging site, has cut off tweets on the professional social network LinkedIn, ending a two-year partnership.

Twitter is a website that lets users broadcast 140-character status updates, or tweets, in real time. The micro-blogging service has had a partnership with LinkedIn since 2009.

"If you had previously synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, and selected the option to share Tweets on LinkedIn, those Tweets generated from Twitter will no longer appear on LinkedIn. There will be no other changes to your LinkedIn experience," Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn head of content, said in a blog post.

LinkedIn users will still be able to post updates to Twitter from LinkedIn, but not the other way around.

Cutting off tweets to LinkedIn users is part of a greater initiative at Twitter to create stricter requirements for developers who use the company's application programming interface (API). An API is a set of tools that lets third-party developers write custom programs for a service.

The new requirements are meant to encourage developers to build apps on Twitter's website. The company said it would "more thoroughly enforce" its Developer Rules of the Road. Twitter wants to ensure its branding is consistent across the Internet, whether tweets are read on the site or a third-party client.

While the company is cracking down on inconsistency, developers are struggling with the narrowing constraints of integrating with Twitter.

In a March 2011 note to developers, Twitter platform team member, Ryan Sarver said, "developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no."

The challenges of building a program that doesn't mimic Twitter while ensuring consistency across all platforms has raised the ire of developers - some feeling jilted by the company. Their concern is that they have invested time and resources into developing apps for Twitter, only to have the company change the rules of the game.

"We're building tools for publishers and investing more and more in our own apps to ensure that you have a great experience everywhere you experience Twitter, no matter what device you're using," Twitter product manager Michael Sippy said in a blog post, where he emphasized upgrades, like Twitter Cards. The new addition to Twitter lets users add a few lines of code, or "card," to a tweet that will add an expanded view of content on Twitter.

Twitter faces its own challenges. Much of the company's content is viewed on third-party sites or programs. The micro-blogging service must find the right balance of running a profitable business and maintaining a robust developers' community.

[TerrySherman]

I think this guy said it best:

I will No Longer Be Tweeting from LinkedIn
(And Neither Will Most People)
http://******/MgJe8d

[TheFark]

I think it is great that we have removed some of the noise from Linked-in. It was originally set up as a business networking tool and has become polluted with everyone's comments on a bunch of meaningless, 'who care' crap. Let's hope Tweets never come back to Linked-in.
Feel free to get read of what people are reading, where they are traveling, what phone app they are using....I could go on, who cares!!

[Tonya_S]

Luckily, I never knew you could post the other way around, from Twitter to Linkedin. It doesn't affect me at all, still awesome!

[micmac666]

Social networking is for dweebs. 'Overrated.

[knewsteerrrrr]

WHO CARES!! Twitty +watty twirps use a stupid thing like that to send one line of text to people they never met.
I hate Linkedin too! every freaking week I used to get these damnable Linkedin invites from idiots I never met, until I wound up having to BLOCK the entire domain name at my server level. Linked in was also HACKED recently and millions of user accounts gotten into, people are FOOLS signing up for that garbage

[knewsteerrrrr]

WHO CARES!! Twitty ****** twirps use a stupid thing like that to send one line of text to people they never met.
I hate Linkedin too! every freaking week I used to get these damnable Linkedin invites from idiots I never met, until I wound up having to BLOCK the entire domain name at my server level. Linked in was also HACKED recently and millions of user accounts gotten into, people are FOOLS signing up for that garbage!

[mbarclay104]

Not mentioned in the article (or is this what is meant by "and selected the option to share Tweets on LinkedIn")? but appears that Twitter has also disabled the #in hashtag in Tweets so no longer get cross-posted to LinkedIn either. And yeah, post only work/professional related stuff to LinkedIn, agree!

[Write2Market-Lisa]

Trying to create information harbors, when actually streamlining communication is better for people, is a bad sign that Twitter is afraid of LinkedIn

[nancymyrland100]

This is good. I have watched my LinkedIn stream become mostly RTs (ReTweets for non-Twitter users) automatically cross-posted from Twitter. This means that people are not present on LinkedIn, and are cross-posting conversations out-of-context. They are not spending much time on LinkedIn actually interacting with their business contacts there, establishing relationships, sharing other's content, conversing, and putting in the time necessary to learn about others who might be there, who are often those with whom they would like to do business. There are partial comments strewn with @names, acronyms, abbreviations and other messages that have caused LinkedIn's main stream to become little more than broadcast medium, vs. a social medium.

This begs the question: "If everyone is cross-posting from other social networking sites, and are not present, who is going to be on LinkedIn to actually read that content that is being posted?"

Group activity and discussions can overcome this lack of presence in the main stream, but that's a conversation for another day.

Nancy Myrland, President, Myrland Marketing
Professional Marketing & Social Media Advisor

[markdolar]

The backlash has begun:

http://bandofmusicians.com/littlemediabusiness_blog/2012/06/30/the-top-ten-reasons-twitter-unlinked-from-linkedin/