After a nonstop barrage of updates last week from the microblogging startup, Twitter might have been expected to take this week off before making any new announcements.
Not so, as Monday night it was revealed that LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking site, has teamed up with Twitter to make it easier for users of both sites to synchronize posts to and from either site.
At LinkedIn, users will now notice a Twitter settings panel, where one can connect a Twitter account and decide whether the account displays on the LinkedIn profile. After adding a Twitter account, one only needs to check a small box marked with a Twitter logo under the status update submission box to cross-post to Twitter.
On Twitter, users can do much the same for linking back to LinkedIn, though they can even decide to send all updates to the other site automatically. If one chooses to opt out of this feature, Twitter supports the insertion of a hashtag (#li or #in) in select tweets, which will signal to Twitter cross-post that select update only. This mirrors Twitter’s support of the #fb tag for cross-posts to Facebook.
According to LinkedIn’s co-founder and current VP, Product Strategy, Allen Blue, this new bond between two of the newest and most popular social sites on the Web could end up being more than just a feature update. Blue believes that Twitter’s grasp of real-time technology along with LinkedIn’s growing database of business data could prove to be a winning combination.
It seems like Twitter is making relationships in any direction. It was just a couple weeks ago that Twitter sealed big deals with both Microsoft and Google to allow indexing of Twitter’s real-time information to supplement search results on Bing and Google. We shall see if a similar relationship blossoms between Twitter and LinkedIn.
