Is Twitter becoming less of a social media and more of a content syndication house?

In what had earlier appeared to be Twitter’s one-off ending of a publishing deal with LinkedIn is now turning out to be just a beginning of a much longer end.

In an earlier post on June 30, I had cited a LinkedIn communication stating, “Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in third-party applications. Starting today Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.” (see http://www.businessandmarket.net/2012/06/linkedin-twitter-out-of-sync-tweets-to.html)

The micro blogging site has fast gained a precious little reputation of being a vast repository of often original content, made even more valuable by a humongous pool of celebrity tweets. Apparently, this rich treasure has a huge potential of being monetized as Twitter users agree to syndicate their tweets through various content distributors. Twitter already has an Alexa rank of 8, which is considerably higher than LinkedIn’s 12.

No wonder then that Twitter would want to guard its content more closely and (perhaps) not hesitate to severe a syndication tie-up, guided by business considerations. It’s not been hesitant of allowing tweets to appear on Facebook though, which is ranked #2 by Alexa. Perhaps a lower ranking is the reason why LinkedIn still allows its posts to appear on Twitter. (Ranking seems to have quite a role to play in who syndicates where, right?)

Twitter doesn’t seem to be stopping at that. In a fresh development, it seeks to assume greater control of its content and users. It said in an official blog post on August 16, 2012, “Additionally, if you are building a Twitter client application… …you will need our permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.” It also noted further, “If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you’ll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count… …Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you’ll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission.” (See: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api)