LinkedIn will no longer be allowed to embed tweet streams.

Twitter head of consumer products says they're cracking down on people displaying tweets in nonTwittery ways:

"We’ve already 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."

Twitter wants to completely control its user experience.

That leaves an opportunity wide open for someone else to build a Twitter that doesn't rely on Twitter's ever-changing policies.

They don't want you displaying tweets in non-Twittery ways, and yet they also say that they don't want you displaying tweets in ways that are too Twittery:

Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.

Twitter Development Talk: consistency and ecosystem opportunities

Essentially, Twitter is making up the rules as it goes AND they have no problem squashing anyone, at any time, if it doesn't serve the agenda of that time.

Developers don't follow Twitter at your own peril: http://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-twitter-experience

Careful, Twitter. You're in danger of angering your user base like MySpace and Digg did: http://gigaom.com/2012/06/30/careful-twitter-remember-what-happened-to-myspace-and-digg/

In the Forbes article Twitter unlinks from LinkedIn is this fascinating developer rant:

"I'm done developing for Twitter."

I wonder how many other developers now feel that way.

Two years later. No one even talks about repurposing tweets anymore.

It turns out they did not anger their userbase.

The only question I have is whether they could have been so much bigger if they had done more for third parties than just embeddable tweet iframes, which many sites do not allow.