Twitter Ditches LinkedIn, Says It’s Not Personal
July 6th, 2012 by
I'm a fan.
“It’s not you. It’s me.” That’s what Twitter proclaimed to LinkedIn this morning, ending a two-year partnership between the micro-blogging giant and the social network site for job seekers. Breakups are hard to do, as the saying goes, but according to LinkedIn, they didn’t even care in the first place.
“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,” says Ryan Rolansky on the official LinkedIn blog. “There will be no other changes to your LinkedIn experience.”
In other words, you can still post updates to Twitter from LinkedIn, but not the other way around. ‘Cause Twitter totally blocked LinkedIn, bro. So uncool.
Jokes aside, Twitter has been getting pretty fussy lately. Developers using their application programming interface (API) have their work cut out for them — it’s notoriously tricky to handle — and the initial Spartan interface has gotten more and more tricked-out over recent months. With all these new bells and whistles, Twitter wants its branding to remain as consistent as possible, which is why sites like LinkedIn are getting kicked off the bandwagon.
While Twitter may seem like an infallible giant to the hyper-focused social media contigent, the truth of the matter is that most people are reading it through a variety of secondary services. If you connect your Twitter stream to Facebook, for example, you can read it all there at the same time as you read about Aunt Margaret and her eighteen cats. So why go to the source site when you can get it all in one place?
Even though the service became famous for its brilliantly minimalistic-efficient service, the company seems determined to expand. Twitter Cards, a new option that offers partner websites a way to show off more content, seems interesting, but not necessarily what I want out of Twitter as a user. Just give me my feeds in Tweet form, let me post dumb photos, and I’ll be fine. Is the majority of the user base really craving more than that? Or is the thrust of Twitter’s new direction less about what the general consumer wants, and more about how Twitter can serve as a business tool?
I think we will see more companies keep their info within their own walls with the competition increasing.
[…] the time Twitter uttered those dreaded words to Linkedin — “I want my (API) keys back” — fast forward one month. In its wake, the separation has […]