Twitterjust put up a blog post talking up its platform approach and long-term strategy. Surprisingly, the company has made some decisions that are sure to irk a couple of third-party developers and startups.

Here’s the big news: aside from Promoted Tweets, Twitter said it will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.

That’s not so good news for TweetUp (and other Twitter-focused advertising startups like Ad.ly and Twad.ly). Particularly not the former, which just launched its live beta at TechCrunch Disrupt half an hour ago.

Here are the reasons Twitter says it decided not to allow third-parties to advertise in the stream:

First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction.

Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience. We believe it is our responsibility to encourage creative product development and to curb practices that compromise innovation.

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.

Twitter adds that when its new Annotations feature launches, there are going to be many new business opportunities on the Twitter platform in addition to those currently available.

The company does recognize that for a few companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which some have invested resources.

It will be interesting to see how those companies will respond to the news. TweetUp, for one, says they never planned to advertise in-stream, so this won’t affect them as much as you would think at first.

Nevertheless, it shows that Twitter’s decisions on the way it moves forward with its platform and how to monetize it most efficiently should keep startups that base their entire business model on the Twitter platform on guard.

• Twitter Cracks Down On Spam Accounts, People Lose Followers
• Twitt Sex: Because Everything Popular Needs A Sex Clone

Yesterday, I moderated a panel at TiEcon featuring the heads of product for Google, Twitter, and Facebook — an interesting group, obviously. It was a good, long discussion (hopefully I’ll have the full video to post soon). But definitely one of the most interesting points of the discussion was when I asked Bradley Horowitz, a Vice President of product management at Google, why Google Buzz doesn’t import tweets in real time? His answer was, well, interesting.

Users of Google Buzz will know that the service is awful at importing tweets. Currently, the import is done in bulk at the end of each day, resulting in a barrage of tweets in streams. It’s so bad, that many users unsubscribe from others who set their Buzz account to auto-import tweets. So why does Google do this? Well, it’s complicated.

It seems logical that Google Buzz would do exactly what FriendFeed (prior to its acquisition by Facebook) would do, which is pull in tweets in realtime. After all, from what I’ve heard from multiple sources, Google does have full access to Twitter’s firehose. This makes sense considering that Google uses the Twitter firehose to populate its search results with tweets baked into them. So why the delay for tweets in Buzz?

When I asked Horowitz this question, he immediately passed the microphone to Twitter’s director of product, Jason Goldman. Goldman immediately passed the microphone back to Horowitz without saying anything. At this point, the audience was getting into it — what’s the answer? Horowitz would only say that Google is working closely with Twitter to come up with the best solution to import tweets.

That, of course, is bullshit.

I pressed, but Horowitz wouldn’t give me anything. So all I can do at this point is speculate based on what I know. Twitter is giving Google full access to its firehose per its agreement for search results. But Buzz may not want to use this data presumably because it would overwhelm Buzz — much like tweets overwhelm FriendFeed. If you’re trying to start a service, it makes sense that you wouldn’t want it to be overrun with data from a competing service. But still, tweets in realtime in Buzz would make it much more useful than it currently is. It would make it, well, FriendFeed.

In other words, I think this is all political. Google doesn’t want Buzz to become yet another Twitter client. And it’s hard to blame them.

Horowitz noted that we’d be hearing more about how Buzz can be used as a platform during Google I/O next week — so hopefully they’ll have more to share about Buzz in general. For now, unfortunately, all of us must suffer through this half-assed approach Buzz takes towards tweets. It makes it the social service that is sort of social.

• For Reasons Unknown, Ukrainian Journalist Sends First Underwater Tweet
• Whrrl 3 Wants To Kill Farmville. Not Foursquare. Not Gowalla….

As I wrote about back in February, ManageTwitter is easily one of the most useful third-party Twitter services out there. While there are plenty of services that help you find new people to follow, there simply aren’t enough that help you prune those that you already follow. For those of us who have been using the service for years now, and have accumulated a lot of people we follow over that time, this is a problem. ManageTwitter solves it brilliantly. And now Twitter is going to kill them.

As the service posted on its Posterous blog yesterday, Twitter has sent the service an email letting them know that they’re breaking one of their rules. Specifically, this is what Twitter wrote:

We’re writing to let you know that your application, ManageTwitter, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates bulk automated user unfollowing, which is not allowed. It’s best for both our users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes, such as removing the “Select All” option (and requiring users to decide on each user individually) to bring your application into compliance.

The problem is that ManageTwitter’s service isn’t automated at all. It simply offers up suggestions for who you should unfollow. As ManageTwitter writes:

Yes our application does facilitate bulk unfollowing BUT ManageTwitter does not facilitate any *automated* bulk unfollowing, the user has to filter based on criteria. The user is still required to do significant processing to unfollow groups of people. Furthermore the system only allows unfollowing of up to only 100 at a time.

They go on to note that they understand Twitter’s rule, but again, do not believe they are breaking it. It’s possible that the portion Twitter doesn’t like is that the checkboxes next to usernames are automatically selected for deletion (I don’t particularly like this either because most users — even many of the ones they suggest — I don’t want to unfollow) — and if so, that’s an easy fix. I have an email into Twitter asking them if that would be good enough and will update when I hear back.

I can certainly see Twitter not approving of the name for trademark reasons — but they’re apparently not disputing that at the moment, just the bulk unfollow bit.

Or maybe Twitter just doesn’t like the fact that ManageTwitter has managed to help 35,000 users unfollow nearly 6 million people on the service. I can’t imagine any social network would like a third-party service changing the social graph in such a way. But again, this service is very useful to many users, and I believe makes Twitter better — even if it is slightly less connected.

ManageTwitter is asking that you retweet this tweet in support of them.

[Thanks Courtenay]

• Twitter’s Project Mayhem Dilemma
• Twitter Influence Authority Klout Releases New Version Of API

And you thought tweeting from space was an achievement?

Ukrainian TV journalist Julia Gorodetskaya (@gorodetskaya) has sent the first documented underwater tweet from the floor of a 19-feet deep dolphinarium in Odessa, Ukraine. The scuba tweeting session was broadcasted by local media (see subtitled video below) and documented by regional press.

The tweet was sent via a mobile phone sealed in plastic from the Twitter website, using the Opera Mini browser. Radio waves passed to the surface through an elongated antenna.

The preparation process and the actual underwater tweeting was also filmed and broadcasted live by Boris Khodorkovsky to his QIK account and published on YouTube and other social media services. You can find pictures of the whole thing on Flickr.

Gorodetskaya, who did not know how to dive or swim prior to the event, sent a total of four messages to Twitter. Below is the first one.

In English, it reads: “This is first in history #underwater_tweet. I told you, @netocrat.”

The event was dreamed up and organized by a national mobile operator to tout the quality of its network. And I can’t help but think about the wonderful opportunity to raise awareness for a good cause in the process that was somehow overlooked, and therefor terribly wasted.

(Image via Flickr / NETOCRAT Communications)

• Tweets In Buzz: It’s Complicated — Well, Maybe Political
• Whrrl 3 Wants To Kill Farmville. Not Foursquare. Not Gowalla….