Is Facebook Next for the Twitter Service Chop?

Recently, Twitter has detached itself from other social platforms by cutting off access to its services.

Its first victim was LinkedIn, when it stopped it from feeding tweets automatically through its stream.

Messages initiated on LinkedIn can still be shared via Twitter, manually, where appropriate, which is the way it is meant to be.

Duplicating one post across different networks is not using them efficiently, and it’s becoming far too easy to post once and send the message out blindly to LinkedIn, Facebook etc. That’s verging on spam.

But Twitter didn’t do this to make LinkedIn a better place. It has its own roadmap, and has ‘…begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.’

Just days ago, it was revealed that Instagram faced a similar snub, when it no longer allowed its users to scrape their Twitter followers to do a bulk import of friends to the photo-filter phenomenon.

It’s an easy way to build a quick following if you’re new to Instagram but not to Twitter. But again, all you’re doing is duplicating your networks, and again, Twitter and Instagram are different beasts.

Welcome Moves

Both moves are welcome in my opinion. Firstly LinkedIn was becoming a ‘dumping ground’ for lazy tweeters. Posts were being bundled into the LinkedIn stream wihout a thought for their context and quite frankly, watering down the business-like voice that LinkedIn is noted for.

What it did to Instagram could point to many things. Was it a snub to new owners Facebook, or is it an indication that Twitter might be planning an Instagram-like service of its own? Or is it simply that it feels its service is being used to rapidly build someone else’s network when it had to build its own, member-by-member, from nothing to over 500 million.

But the biggest question I’m asking is, will Facebook be next? I’ve always advised against linking Facebook to Twitter and vice versa, favouring a ‘horses for courses’ approach, using content that is suitable for, and styled for, individual networks.

In fact I wrote about it on this very blog (Why linking Twitter to Facebook is a dumbass thing to do) but with Twitter actively encouraging it on signup, and Facebook allowing the same to happen in reverse, it will continue unabated, if nobody cuts the cord.

Chalk and Cheese

The problem being that Facebook and Twitter are like chalk and cheese. They’re both social networks, but incredibly different. Like a broadsheet and tabloid are both newspapers, but the content published in each is different in style, content and design. Like I said, horses for courses.

So will Twitter put an end to this unhealthy liaison once and for all. Will they force people to think before they post: ‘which network is this bit of content best for?’.

If they do target Facebook next, it will cause the biggest outrage of all, because it is the one most used, or should I say abused.

For me, the chop won’t come soon enough. Roll on the ‘cleansing of the networks’. What do you think reader?

Marc Hindley is the founder of wonderfully creative web design consultancy, Canary Dwarf, who happen to be our technical partners.

Follow @marchindley

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Has Twitter Made Customer Service Lazy? [Infographic]

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I agree that linking various social media accounts is widely abused, but anybody disliking what they find in their streams has the choice of unfollowing or unsubscribing from that person’s or business’s feed. My Facebook page posts will show up on Twitter but not vice versa as I also post directly to Twitter and don’t necessarily want that content to clutter up my Facebook stream. My personal Facebook profile is not linked to Twitter so there are no issues there. It really is not that difficult to manage. It would be time consuming if I have a presence on several social networking platforms and can’t link anything, and would probably lead to me dropping all but a couple of platforms so as not to loose track of what has been posted where. It would be an interesting development if that where to happen on a wide scale – I guess some social networking sites would go down under very quickly as usage declines.

http://twitter.com/MarcHindley Marc Hindley

Thanks for your reply. Some content will always be shareable across multiple platforms. The problem is that, unless you post it yourself, you have no control over whether the message makes sense if you don’t post it yourself, as well as making traffic more difficult to measure.

You are right that some people might drops networks if they couldn’t autopost, and I think that demonstrates the reasoning behind Twitter doing what it’s doing. It is seeing itself being used to rack up other networks. In LinkedIn’s case, by sending traffic to other sites sometimes completely bypassing Twitter, and for Instagram, by providing a ready-made user database.
No social network will succeed if it is a clone of another, and these processes, while appealing to our natural instincts of saving time, are in danger of allowing that to happen, and when they provide no additional value, that’s when they will start to die off.

http://twitter.com/Gerrytonic Gerry Grant

I so hope you are right. I do share the same content across networks sometimes, but the tone of the message is different. I hate seeing Facebook posts on Twitter and vice versa, it’s just plain lazy. If you don’t have time for both then pick the one you get the most from.

http://twitter.com/MarcHindley Marc Hindley

Gerry, you’re right, and I would say the same thing, If you really don’t have the time to post to a network manually, don’t do it. Some things need to be shared across both, or many, networks, but the decision to do that should be based on their relevance to audience and appropriateness of the network. This is why Facebook>Twitter fails so miserably, it mangles messages and removes context.

http://twitter.com/btocher Baxter Tocher

I agree with what you say – the two networks are very different, and should normally be kept separate, But I wonder how Twitter will be able to prevent the Selective Tweets app on Facebook from reading a user’s Twitter output and posting it, when nominated, to FB. It does have value in making the user consider tweets carefully before crossposting them.

http://twitter.com/MarcHindley Marc Hindley

Thanks Baxter, I think Twitter could easily block the selective tweets, although I don’t think they will. Therein lies some control, and as a consequence some thought must go into the decision, and by being selective, doesn’t suffer the same thoughtless use. But let’s hope that whatever happens, it nurtures a better social landscape.