Twitter closes the gates further on 3rd parties, removes posting source attribution

The great Twitter breakup is continuing. After kicking Instagram and Tumblr to the curb and closing the doors on developers, Twitter has taken another step in their relentless pursuit of a walled garden by eliminating 3rd party posting app attribution from Tweets.

The Tweet below was posted via a posting tool other than Twitter.com. Before, the tool used (in this case, KPA Engage) would have received an attribution link leading to the tool’s homepage. Now, the attribution is gone.

It’s sad to know that if In ‘n Out was open right now I’d be there. Heading to the consolation drive-thru. On my way, @tacobell

— JD Rucker (@0boy) August 27, 2012

According to TheNextWeb:

This move makes tweets client-agnostic to the reader. For someone viewing Twitter, which a lot of people do exclusively, it looks like a cohesive whole, not a set of posts coming from disparate clients. This is part of the company’s move to make it feel more homogenous and to emphasize its first-party clients.

Twitter will continue to head down this road as they now feel they are big enough to not have to rely on others. Facebook and Google continue to rely on others, which makes the recent Applesque moves by Twitter a little perplexing. What do they know that we don’t?

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“Angry Bird” image courtesy of Shutterstock.