Twitter dumps LinkedIn

The social media news of the day is Twitter’s severance of its relationship with LinkedIn. The reasons behind this move relate to Twitters desire to enforce a more robust framework for developers who use the company’s application programming interface (API) to work within.

The move is understandable from a business point of view and has been designed to encourage developers to build apps on Twitter’s website. However, it will remove a useful means of communication from it’s purely professional users who have optimised their business related social media presence by linking their Twitter posts to feed their LinkedIn account.

The changes by Twitter mean that any post to Twitter will now not show on LinkedIn, however, LinkedIn posts will continue to show in your Twitter feed (if your accounts have been synced to allow it).

There is an upside to this change, for those of us who use LinkedIn as business networking and development tool, though. The removal of tweets, retweets and tweet conversations will dramatically reduce the (often non-business related) noise in most LinkedIn account feeds, making them more suited for purpose, easier to digest and more ‘on target and message’ for true business users.

Though LinkedIn might feel this move by Twitter to be a snub right now, it may prove a positive move in the long term by enabling LinkedIn to refocus on its primary objective of offering an undiluted professional networking and sharing platform, a purpose that has become somewhat clouded in the current, crowded and noisy social media arena of late.

It will be interesting to see how this story progresses and what developments occur, if any, to circumvent Twitter’s ban. Watch this space.

You can read the full CBS article here