Twitter Gives LinkedIn The Bird
Owen Thomas
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is keeping tweets on the reservation.
Photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
According to a LinkedIn blog post, Twitter is dropping a two-and-a-half-year-old partnership with LinkedIn that allowed users of the professional social network to publish tweets to their LinkedIn profiles.Twitter consumer product chief Michael Sippey wrote in a post on Twitter's developer blog that the changes were part of a move to deliver a "core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools."
Twitter has been gradually moving to push out partners who display tweets on their websites, but those efforts have been primarily focused on mobile clients, where Twitter's been emphasising its own offerings.
Users will still be able to post updates on LinkedIn and broadcast those updates to Twitter, but content-sharing won't go the other way.
That matches Twitter's general strategy of late: It is happy to have others send content into Twitter, but not so happy to have others use tweets as content elsewhere.
What's bizarre, though, is that Twitter just upgraded its own Facebook app, which crossposts tweets to users' Facebook profiles—exactly what LinkedIn has been doing, with Twitter's blessing, since 2009.
Twitter has long struggled with enforcing a consistent set of rules and practices for partners like LinkedIn. Developers who created apps for viewing tweets, for example, have found themselves placed at a disadvantage by changes to Twitter's rules and Twitter's efforts to develop its own mobile clients.
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