LinkedIn Shutters Twitter Widget ‘Tweets’ Because Of ‘Extremely Low Usage’

LinkedIn is planning to shut down its Tweets application as of January 31, 2012. As you may remember, the Tweets application allowed users find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter, view Twitter feeds of connections, recommend Twitter users to follow, and more.

In an announcement, LinkedIn says that the application will be removed from all profiles and the homepage. From the announcement: At LinkedIn, we want to provide a simple and efficient experience for members like you. So from time to time, we take a look at our set of features to evaluate how they’re being used by our members. Part of this process sometimes means we decide to eliminate a feature, so we can better invest those resources in building more great LinkedIn products.

Those products include LinkedIn Signal and news aggregator LinkedIn Today.

It sounds like the application wasn’t being used frequently by members (LinkedIn has since taken the Tweet the down, but we have a screengrab below). But from the statement made in the announcement embedded above, that’s probably the likely reason for the widget’s demise. LinkedIn clarified to us that indeed users are still using Twitter from LinkedIn, however, through the built in integrations that are separate from the widget. In essence, the widget became redundant because Twitter is now so baked into the main LinkedIn experience.

The full-fledged version of the Tweets Application was only launched in 2010. With Tweets, you could display your most recent tweets on your LinkedIn profile, access to the updates of people you are following on Twitter, and Tweet, reply, and re-tweet from your LinkedIn home page.

LinkedIn says that it’s not eliminating the Twitter integration completely as your Twitter handle will still be shown on your profile, and if you have integrated your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, Tweets with the hashtag ‘#in’ will still display these Tweets on your profile. And you’ll still be able to Tweet from LinkedIn directly, and post from Twitter to LinkedIn (with the hashtag ‘#in’). But the widget, which acted as more of a feature-rich client, will be laid to rest.