LinkedIn vs. Twitter
Everything I blog about here goes to my blog’s Twitter account @LukasRosBlog, which in turn is imported to my LinkedIn profile. Well, it used to be! Today morning I received a mail from LinkedIn and there is a blog post with the same words:
As Twitter shared earlier today in a blog post from Michael Sippey, they are increasingly focused on “providing the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools.” Consistent with Twitter’s evolving platform efforts, Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn starting later today.
The aforementioned blog post from Twitter’s Michael Sippey talks about the new expanded Tweets, or “Twitter Cards”, which allow content such as images, videos, text snippets and possibly even interactive content to be displayed inside a Tweet. Since third party clients may not be able to deliver them properly, Twitter doesn’t want their users to use them. This is not news and it was told to developers before:
Back in March of 2011, my colleague Ryan Sarver said that developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.”
It’s surely not a coincidence that both companies posted to their blogs at almost the same time, as TheNextWeb’s Matthew Panzarino notes. So there are a few possible explanations for LinkedIn’s move:
- LinkedIn doesn’t want to display extended Tweets in the way Twitter expected them to do because it won’t fit in their stream.
- LinkedIn doesn’t want to display advertisements from Twitter in their stream (which Twitter announced may be required in future).
- LinkedIn feels that the syndicated content from Twitter is noise in their stream. This would be the same reason that Google+ cites when asked why it doesn’t offer external access to their sharing feature, and interestingly the comments on Mashable are overwhelmingly positive and applaud LinkedIn for the decision.
- Twitter is simply afraid that people read Tweets on LinkedIn instead of using Twitter itself, so they requested LinkedIn to remove it.
- Twitter wants to separate itself from LinkedIn after the recent password disaster. Mashable’s Kate Freeman raises this point but dismisses it as doubtful herself.
I guess we’re seeing a combination of reasons here, but even if nothing else, this is a proof that there’s still a kind of war going on in social networking and APIs and that companies have to look for market share and monetization and cannot always play well and fair with everyone else, which is understandable, but sad especially in Twitter’s case which would never have become what it is without its open developer ecosystem, as TheNextWeb mourns.
