According to Mashable there has been a lot of controversy following Twitter’s most recent announcement that means third party sponsored Tweets will no longer appear in the user timeline. The uproar has not come from Tweeters who may find that the move enhances their own experience when reading others’ timelines, but instead from the active community of developers that has grown around the Twitter API and the Twitter user base. Presumably, those that have their own income stream based on sponsored ads may also have some reason to air their grievances although some advertising is still allowed.

While third party ads in the timeline are out of the question, there are still other ways to directly monetise your Twitter following. Advertisements that are not displayed in the timeline itself, and are therefore displayed around the edge, are still OK even through third parties. What’s more, you can still use the Twitter run Promoted Tweets service to show sponsored Tweets in your timeline. However, third party publisher applications have proven especially popular because of the greater freedom that they offer.

The move has undoubtedly been taken to protect the user experience (too many sponsored Tweets can be incredibly annoying and can make a timeline difficult to follow with any accuracy) but it has also been taken to help Twitter monetise their own network. Again, there are few that can have genuine argument with this but the big problem comes in the fact that developers feel they have not only been kept in the dark over the situation but have been given misleading and inaccurate information in the past.