Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Ban of Third Party Paid Tweets on Services that Leverage the Twitter API


Twitter is an open, real-time introduction and information service. On a daily basis we introduce millions to interesting people, trends, content, URLs, organizations, lists, companies, products and services. These introductions result in the formation of a dynamic real-time interest graph. At any given moment, the vast network of connections on Twitter paints a picture of a universe of interests. We follow those people, organizations, services, and other users that interest us, and in turn, others follow us.

- @  Twitter Blog


Twitter announced Monday that there will be no more third party paid tweeting using the Twitter API.  This less than two weeks after Ad.ly completed 5 million dollars in equity funding. In October of 2009 Ad.ly received $500,000 in seed money.  As of yet there has been no blog postings on Ad.ly mentioning this move by Twitter. Twitter is in the process of updating their ToS to "articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly".


Twitter's blog post was made to explain what they are building and how they intend to "sustain the company and ecosystem".  Buried in paragraph eight is the potential killshot to third party applications that leverage the Twitter API to inject paid tweets into a timeline.