In a blog post released today (May 24^th, 2010) Twitter COO, Dick Costolo, covered a wide variety of topics regarding the Twitter platform. His main emphasis was on the fact that the Twitter management team is concerned with protecting the long-term value of the Twitter platform. Costolo’s main argument follows:

“It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison.”

Based on this rationale, Twitter is modifying their terms of service to better reflect how developers can use their platform going forward:

“For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.”

So, the question is will these new changes affect the emerging, innovative job tweet services like tweetajob or TweetMYJobs? Included in the services offered to employers is the opportunity to pay to post jobs on the timeline. Until the updated Terms of Service are released and these companies have had a chance to dig into the details and formulate their response, we won’t know for sure the impact. But, Twitter certainly seems to be drawing a line in the sand on how companies can make money using their platform. How do you think Twitter’s updated terms will affect job tweet services?

–Omowale Casselle (@mysensay)

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About the Author: Omowale Casselle is the co-founder and CEO of mySenSay, a social recruiting community focused on connecting talented college students with amazing entry-level employment opportunities. Our solution integrates social media, real-time web-based communication, and intelligent analytics to enable employers and students to discover, interact, and connect with each other.

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