This afternoon I received the following announcement from LinkedIn:

LinkedIn and Twitter have worked together since 2009 to enable you to share your professional conversations on both platforms. 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.

Such a simple statement and yet with potentially quite significant ramifications. What it really shows is the unwrapping of existing social media networks as each business struggles to control it’s users, it’s influence and at the heart, it’s revenue stream.

While the impact of such an announcement is hard to quantify – Linkedin had suggestions in it’s communication how users should continue to work through it’s product to get tweets out – the underlying trend here is the real story.

Social media is not one happy sandpit. It’s a complex and churning ecosystem of competing solutions each trying to slice out a share of our increasingly limited time. It’s an eco system of increasingly unsocial companies.

The gloves are off – let battle commence.

Dick Reed
Just Media, Inc.