Posts Tagged ‘developers’

Someone might need to send a memo to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo letting him know how to play nice in the playground. At the beginning of the month Twitter cut off ties with the professional network LinkedIn, and it looks like the vintage-lunch-snap sharing app Instagram could be next in line for the chop.

The changes have come after Twitter decided to clamp down on which developers could and couldn’t use the Twitter API. As of June 29, Twitter users could no longer post Twitter updates on LinkedIn. This move has drawn criticism from the developer community, as those who spent time developing apps for Twitter have now seen their hair work wasted.

Instagram has also felt the knock-on effect of these changes. Instagram users can no longer find Twitter friends who are using Instgram, and Forbes suggests that the next move will be to stop users from posting their snaps to Twitter too.

In an age when users expect their social networks to be, well, social, these changes seem to be the antithesis of our inter-connected expectations. There have been suggestions that Twitter made these changes due to the recent acquisition of Instagram by Facebook, which would suggest that Facebook will be next in line to be dismissed by Twitter.

Michael Sippey outlined Twitters’ plans in a recent blog post:

As always, we’re hard at work building tools that make it easy for developers to build common Twitter features into their own sites in a simple and consistent way. Some examples of these tools include the Tweet Button, Follow Button, embeddable Tweets and the search widget. Ultimately, we want to make sure that the Twitter experience is straightforward and easy to understand — whether you’re on Twitter.com or elsewhere on the web.

Essentially, Twitter is trying to control the way their platform is seen and used across third party sites, which is how the majority of their users access the micro-blogging service. They want to make sure that Tweets continue to show up across the web looking like Tweets.

All Things D suggested that Flipboard are the kind of apps which could see their Twitter connections cut. The social magazine allows users to pull news items and stories from a variety of sources, including Twitter, and present them in a magazine style layout. Tweets no longer look like Tweets, and this is precisely what Twitter wants to stop.

What do you think? Is Twitter painting itself into a corner with these new changes?

Here’s another skill you SEO professionals might want to throw on your CV; App Store Optimisation (ASO). The art of making one app stand out amongst the 600,000 available on the Apple app store, and the 500,000 available for Android.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone in this quest; the lovely folks over at Apple HQ have come up with this nifty little tool for helping you track and improve your app store rankings.

Sign up and you’ll get a 30 day free trial, after that you can pay $14, $29 or $99 per month to monitor 1, 3 or 50 apps.

As the app store is relatively new, it’s still a very simple system and the only variable information you can give you app which matters is: the app name, the publisher name and the keywords. With only 100 characters to define your app in keywords, you’d better hope you’re picking the right ones; which is where ASO comes into play.

This ASO tool allows you to track your app store ranking over the past month, it will show you how your app’s ranking changes over time, and what the top 10 apps in your selected category are. These are your key competitors. Let the games begin.

Now you know who you’re competing with for those elusive top 10 spots, the ASO tool can tell you what search queries were used to find your app. This will put you well on your way to selecting the most relevant and successful keywords. Using the wrong keywords is a major pitfall of regular SEO too; ASO is no different.

It will also offer a comparison of your keywords with the keywords used for your competitors; perfect for finding out why the top 10 apps rank so high.

And finally, for the data obsessed and hyper competitive, it will also send daily updates so you can fret over your ranking over breakfast.

It might be worth getting in there soon with this app and gaining some ground with your ranking; it won’t be long before everyone is optimising. Get in there quick and you could use this valuable tool to gain popularity which might help keep you at the top of the listings.