Last week Linkedin announced that it “will be shutting off the Tweets application on January 31, 2012”.
Here is the announcement:
I found out about Tweets in May 2010 from this post on the Linkedin Blog and have blogged about Linkedin and Twitter integration on and off since. Integration has some downsides, in particular the tendency of inexperienced users to connect both accounts so everything they tweet is shared with their Linkedin connections. You can see my screencast about this here.
The fact that Linkedin is dropping direct connection of this type is good for Linkedin, but what about a feature of the integration that is really useful? This is the ability to find out which of your connections have twitter accounts and follow them. A healthy use of this would actually negate the need that some users have felt to broadcast their tweets to their connections on Linkedin, providing an alternative way to connect with some of their contacts.
The consensus appears to be that the reason Linkedin is abandoning Tweets is lack of use, but I’m not really surprised at that – Linkedin hides its applications very well from users and didn’t encourage its use much. The loss of the connections tab would be a huge shame however. I hope they keep it on.
Thanks for sharing this Sue.
I think this is a positive move on the whole by LinkedIn. People can still post tweets to LinkedIn using the #in tag, but hopefully they will think more about how appropriate each individual tweet is for a different platform before sharing it.
Too many people automatically share tweets on other platforms, despite the fact their audience may be different, their objectives may be different and the language used is different. Anything that encourages more thought and less automation is a good thing.
Hi Andy,
Yes definitely agree with you about that. So many people make the mistake of sharing things inappropriately with different audiences.
These tools are all about the audience, after all!