I pointed out last week my disdain at Twitter becoming a one-company economic wrecking ball, with one single blog post destroying the futures of $20 M worth of VC backed Twitter startups. Either Twitter is now backtracking on their previous policy of “outlawing” sponsored tweet programs, or they’re clarifying their stance to mean that they’re not trying to rid the network of sponsored tweets not originated from Twitter itself. It’s hard to say, but whatever the case, the message now emanating (and I mean to use that vague sounding word) from Twitter seems to be one that sounds much different from the one we heard last week.

In case you missed it, Twitter’s Dick Costolo put out a blog post on Twitter’s official blog; it was flowery, and focused on the fact that they wanted the platform to be “true to the Twitter vision.” It was a very “me-centric” post on Twitter’s behalf, and was personally very off-putting (were I the editor of the blog, I would have advised the messaging to center around thoughts of being “user-centric” instead).

The conclusion I drew from the post was the same conclusion most of the rest of the blogosphere drew: Twitter was ousting pay-per-tweets from their developer ecosystem.

Since I put out my post, I’ve seen the evidence start to mount that this may not be the case. Sarah Perez best captured this confusion at ReadWriteWeb today in her post entitled  “Twitter Ad Changes: Who’s Affected, Who’s Not.”

Then who is affected? That’s the real question. From everything we’ve heard, no businesses built on top of Twitter have been shut down as of yet. (Let us know if you’ve heard otherwise).

The secret to the ToS change and its meaning can be found within the FAQ. In response to the question "What sort of advertising is not allowed?", the answer reads:

– Advertisements that resemble or might be confused by users as a Tweet

– Paid Tweets injected into any timeline on a service that leverages the Twitter API (other than Promoted Tweets). This applies to any Twitter stream, whether user based, search based, or other

The ToS again clarifies that individuals being paid to tweet will not be affected, but concludes with a dire warning to those from the ad networks proclaiming everything is OK:

"As with any practice, however, we are following this activity and will prohibit practices that have harmful effects on our ecosystem."

In other words, this may change again.

Twitter would not comment on the Terms of Service changes nor its implications.

Louis Gray, amongst many other things an advisor to potentially affected company MyLikes, put out a blog post last week indicating that he and Bindu didn’t believe their company would be affected by the new rules change.

As best as I am able to understand it, Twitter is continuing to try and improve the user experience on their service, which at times has been less than fantastic. On the back of their efforts to weed out spammers, reduce the artificially-inflated visibility of hand-selected celebrities, reduce negatively-intended automation, improving uptime, and expanding a familiar presence to onboard new users, Monday’s announcement looks like they want to improve the clarity of sponsored content on the network, while also protecting their own revenue stream.

I originally expressed some skepticism that this might follow the letter, but not the intent, of the guideline. Then Louis and Magpie founder Jan Schulz-Hofen contacted me to clarify Magpie’s interpretation of the new rules based on some new information. From Jan’s email:

The changes have been widely misinterpreted by the press (and TechCrunch, Mashable, etc.) as being the end of many in-stream ad networks, such as SponsoredTweets, Ad.ly, and Magpie. Twitter have recently clarified their statement and given the go-ahead for Twitter ad networks, but no blogger/journalist has picked up the story yet.

Both Louis and Jan pointed to a thread on the Twitter Developer Talk Google Group where Twitter’s Ryan Sarver commented on the issue directly:

I want to make sure this part is clear — this policy change isn’t meant to say that we are going to start policing if the content of something a user
tweets is an ad or not. The policy change affects 3rd party services that were putting ads in the middle of a timeline.

So if Liz is paid by Reebok to tweet about how much she loves their new shoes, we are not going to be policing that any more than we were on Friday.
This policy also *does not prohibit* services like Ad.ly that help facilitate those relationships or even help her post the ads to her timeline on her behalf.

It *does prohibit* an application from calling out to a service to find an ad to serve to Liz that will get inserted into the timeline she is viewing.

The language is somewhat nuanced but it sounds like we might need to make the policy more explicit as a number of people are misinterpreting it.

Let me know if you have more questions.

Twitter, however, has refused to issue comment through all other official channels on the topic, according to all the major tech blogs that have written on the topic today. It makes for a bizarre scenario – on the one hand, Ryan Sarver’s message is very clear on Twitter’s position, but trumpeting that message from the smallest soapbox imaginable does little to quell the fear, uncertainty and doubt in the developer space created by Dick Costolo’s murky language.

Certainly, this isn’t the pall that Twitter wants to cast over it’s ecosystem and any other competing ad platforms to their own. Surely not, right? So far, the only investor in this space that’s expressed total confidence that Twitter isn’t eventually going to change it’s mind on this has been SiliconANGLE contributor Mark Suster, but no other investor regularly blogs or makes public statements has agreed with him (and other investors have very vocally disagreed, including the now famous “drunken uzi” quote from Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon).

I, for one, think it’s a crying shame. Whether the effect is intentional or accidental, it harms us all, not just the Twitter ecosystem. There are arguably two real social developer ecosystems with massive mainstream visibility, and those are Twitter and Facebook. When their developers move, it makes headlines, which can’t be said about almost any other community. When aspersions are cast on either of these companies, it reflects poorly on the whole social sector and serves to undermine even the most philosophically diametrically opposed projects (such as ActivityStrea.ms or federated real time web).

I understand, through the grapevine of course, that there are large shifts coming to the way that Twitter communicates with the public (some of which are already visible). I certainly hope they keep these faux pas in mind. With great success comes great scrutiny, and Twitter will need to self-scrutinize the messages they’re sending the world. While most of us in the blogosphere may be on the tail end of Louis Gray’s “Early Adopter Behavior Curve” (and thus prone to being overly critical of Twitter), we still want to want to love Twitter. Here’s hoping that the communication company continues to improve their company communications (at least as much as they’ve improved their server stability).