The changes Twitter announced in August 2012 to limit what other services could do with tweets angered developers, and the argument here was that newsrooms aggregating and curating social media had as much at stake. The “Display Guidelines” were being reissued as “Display Requirements”, with strict rules on how a tweet could be shown, justified as a way “to ensure that Twitter users have a consistent experience wherever they see and interact with tweets”.
One clause did the damage. Tweets grouped together into a timeline, the requirements said, “should not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other networks.” That is precisely what a news organisation does when it covers a breaking story through a tool such as ScribbleLive or Storify. Marco Arment, who built Instapaper, read the rule as “very broad” and likely to “bite more services and apps than you may expect”, and guessed it was the clause behind Twitter’s dispute with LinkedIn and behind Flipboard chief executive Mike McCue’s departure from the Twitter board.
The practice at risk was the live blog, by then standard on news sites: material from reporters, news agencies and social platforms pulled into one running page, with the journalist working as a curator choosing the most useful item, whether a tweet, a video or a photograph. A rule against mixing tweets with anything else cut against that directly, and against the more open and networked reporting the live blog had made routine.