Los Angeles — Popular micro-blogging outfit Twitter and business-networking site LinkedIn in a surprising move ended their nearly three-year partnership today, when LinkedIn announced that it will no longer integrate tweets.
In fact, a major part of Twitter’s success has been through the integration of 3rd party suppliers via their API. But, this ends a partnership that began in 2009, LinkedIn users could link their accounts to Twitter, with messages posted to Twitter automatically showing up on the LinkedIn news feed. That will no longer be the case.
LinkedIn’s Ryan Roslansky directed to a Friday blog post from Twitter product team director Michael Sippey, in which Sippey said Twitter is 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,” LinkedIn’s Roslansky wrote in his own blog post.
Although, the connection to Twitter is not completely lost. LinkedIn users can still push updates through the networking site to Twitter via the “Share” button, which will update LinkedIn connections and Twitter followers, but the the reverse is no longer possible.
In the early days Twitter was liberal about how developers could interact with the API as they sought to grow the user base towards critical mass.
Commented Salvador Rodriguez in the LA Times, “That is bad news for LinkedIn, since so much of its users’ content comes from Twitter.”
One theory communicated by Mashable: Twitter wanted to separate itself from Linkedin after the recent password breach in which 6 million LinkedIn passwords were stolen.
Twitter’s Sippey did not specifically referred LinkedIn in his blog post, except to state that Twitter has “already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners.”
Sippey further discussed about the company’s new “expanded tweets” feature, or Twitter cards, which allows for a “richer” tweeting experience.
“Twitter cards are an important step toward where we are heading with our platform, which involves creating new opportunities to build engaging experiences into Twitter,” Sippey wrote. “That is, we want developers to be able to build applications that run within Tweets.”
As a matter of fact, the move emphasize a shift from Twitter towards controlling how users interact with the site more tightly. For the last few years users have been able to circulate 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 Sippey in a company blog post, “whether you are on Twitter.com or elsewhere on the web.”
Surprisingly, this comes-forth a little over a year after Twitter enforced a moratorium on third-party apps. “That guidance continues to apply as much as ever today,” Sippey said today. “In the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.”
Unfortunately, LinkedIn recently made headlines with a password snafu, when the site was hacked and about 6 million of the network’s 161 million users’ keys were stolen. The website was subsequently hit with a lawsuit accusing the social network of failing to properly secure users’ data.