Jessica Puente

On June 29th, Michael Sippey, the director of consumer products at Twitter posted a blog on the Twitter developer blog titled, “Delivering a consistent Twitter experience.”

The first paragraph is your typical, “Yes, we’re still awesome and we know it.”  The second paragraph is vague but you should note the stress Twitter puts on developers building/creating  into Twitter.

It’s okay. Twitter still wants to make it easy for you to work their tools into your own site, “Some examples of these tools include the Tweet Button, Follow Button, embeddable Tweets and the search widget.”

Oh thank god. That was close.  Everybody needs their Twitter apps, #amiright?

Then the blog brings up an article from March 2011 where Platform Lead Ryan Sarver said that developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” This was right after everyone freaked out because Twitter suspended UberMedia for privacy violations. In case you didn’t know, UberMedia acquired Tweetdeck in February 2011. By May of that year, Twitter owned Tweetdeck.

So at least we know some Twitter owned apps are safe as well as those that abide by Twitter’s “Developer Rules of the Road.”

In the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

This was the last post to date.

And so we all moved on with our lives. But later that day LinkedIn had some things to say. It was like when you explain a break up to your friend and try to convince them it was a “mutual” thing but they can tell you’re actually really sad about it.

Ryan Roslansky, head of content products, laments, “Since this relationship began, some of you chose to sync your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts…Consistent with Twitter’s evolving platform efforts, Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn starting later today.”

You can still send your updates to Twitter from LinkedIn. You just won’t see them in your LinkedIn feed because that’s probably too much like trying to “reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.”

So what is too much and what isn’t? And what does that mean for apps like Tweetbot? Who just release its mac desktop app by the way.

As far as I can tell, Twitter widget embeds are still working. Twitter just doesn’t let you see the code for it anymore. If you go to twitter.com/about/resources/widgets or Google search Twitter widgets you’ll be shown this url but immediately redirected to their trademark and content display policy.

I did some digging on the Twitter developers site and a developer named Arne Roomann-Kurrik (I’m not kidding) posted this yesterday, “It looks like there’s currently a bug with the API server which breaks widgets. We don’t have an ETA on a fix, but you shouldn’t have to do anything in the meantime — we’ll fix this on our end as soon as we can.”

I have that widget on one of my web pages and it’s working fine. That still doesn’t answer why the code is gone and if LinkedIn is just the first in line of Twitter dumpees.

I guess time and tweets will tell.