In a recent blog post, Twitter has announced that they will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline or any service that leverages the Twitter API.
They go on to explain that they want to give importance to architecting for extensibility, providing a robust API and ensuring the long term health and value of the user experience.
Twitter manages the integrity and relevance of the content in the network, in the form of the timeline, and they spend a good deal of time and money, to ensure user satisfaction.
It is true that in order to monetize their site, they have announced some measures lately, and one of them is Promoted Tweets. They clarify however that these tweets have to be relevant in order to retain the basic essence of Twitter.
Thus they have decided to disallow third party apps developers from injecting paid tweets into any of their services.
In effect ad networks like ‘Sponsored Tweets’ and ‘Ad.ly’ will be discontinued.
As may be expected, many third party developers have reacted quite negatively to this decision. They feel that this decision has only been taken with the intention of avoiding any possible competition to ‘Promoted Tweets’.
‘What The Trend’ analyst Liz Pullen says, “The problem is that business have been created, received funding and developed over the past year, with the full knowledge of Twitter, and this just undercuts & destroys them.”
Others have also said that they have been building these apps after being told by Twitter that “they had nothing to worry about.”
Twitter client Eric Woodward said “It is clear that Twitter is going to take everything for themselves,”
