Friendfeed to Twitter to LinkedIn

: Image via CrunchBase

As usual Mashable keeps us up with the news, and especially when there’s an inside track. Those guys certainly have good sources and access to the thought leaders.

I got pretty excited about this. All sorts of people who would never think of Twitter or Facebook are joining LinkedIn. It seems to the the professionally acceptable side of social media. Increasingly Searching for somebody throws up their LinkedIn profile. Therefore it makes sense to use autopost services (e.g. Friendfeed) to publish our stuff on Twitter and have it automatically show up on our LinkedIn profile. Just like it does with Facebook.

The excitement palled a little soon after I set up the link. A typically self deprecating “more proof I’m a jerk” type post on Twitter got me a thinly veiled sales pitch, from some type of coach, of course.

The prevalence of blatant selling is LinkedIn’s main weakness, and why most don’t seriously engage with the networks. If posting my Twitter updates there is going to bring more unsolicited sales pitches to my inbox I won’t be doing it for long,

How about you?

Anyway this is what Mashable reported:

Twitter’s spree of partnerships isn’t stopping anytime soon. Late last month, Microsoft and Twitter struck a search deal to integrate Twitter within Bing. Mere hours later, Google struck back with its own search deal with Twitter.

Now there’s a new Twitter partnership launching tonight. This one is between Twitter and LinkedIn, the popular business social network. Starting tonight and tomorrow morning, users of both services can sync their status updates. Yes, you can tweet from Twitter and it will update your LinkedIn, and vice versa.

The new feature, which will roll out overnight, allows you to cross-post to both networks. From the LinkedIn side, there is a Twitter Settings panel that allows you to link your accounts and choose whether your Twitter account appears on your profile. There is also now a special box that you can check to tell LinkedIn whether you want to tweet out specific status updates:

The integration on the Twitter side is even more interesting. In your settings, you can link your LinkedIn account to your Twitter and then choose whether you want to share all of your tweets on LinkedIn OR just specific ones by using one of two hashtags: #li or #in.

This is exactly like the Selective Twitter Status Facebook app, which updates your Facebook with the #fb hashtag. The difference this time is that Twitter officially supports the #li and #in hashtags for auto-updating LinkedIn:

The Future of the Twitter and LinkedIn Partnership

I spoke with LinkedIn co-founder Allen blue about the new partnership and its implications. He told me that the first serious talks between Twitter and LinkedIn occurred 3 to 4 months ago. Part of the reason that this partnership occurred is because Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman share a close relationship.