Did Twitter Just Kill TweetMyJobs, TweetaJob, TwitterJobSearch, TwitJobSearch?

Twitter just announced that it is clamping down on third party sites and networks which use Twitter’s application programming interface (API) to distribute ads to Twitter subscribers. The new rules won’t impact those who manually post paid ads to their Twitter accounts but will certainly effect the most popular Twitter job board sites such as TweetMyJobs, TweetaJob, TwitterJobSearch, and TwitJobSearch.
“We will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API,” wrote Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer, Dick Costolo, in a blog posting.

These and the other Twitter job boards have basically created nice front-ends for employers to promote their job openings through Twitter and for job seekers to search for those jobs. There’s a perception — probably correct — by many job seekers that the jobs posted to Twitter tend to show up there before they show up on traditional, general job boards such as Monster or Careerbuilder so the adoption rate by job seekers to the Twitter job boards has been quite healthy.
But Twitter’s announcement could be devastating to the Twitter job boards as it appears that they’ll no longer be able to send job posting ads to Twitter unless some poor slob ends up posting them manually, one at a time. The cost of implementing a manual system will surely be cost prohibitive. So what will these sites do? Well, they’ll probably do exactly what Twitter is signaling that they want these third party API users to do: pay Twitter a share of the revenue being generated largely from the value delivered by Twitter.
Twitter’s announcement not only made it clear that third party API delivered ads will no longer be accepted but it also made it clear that the third parties will be allowed to distribute their advertising content through Twitter by using Twitter’s new Promoted Tweets paid placement service. The Twitter job boards will therefore be hurt financially as they’ll no longer be able to retain all of their revenues and instead will have to share some of that with Twitter, but in the long run this could prove to be a blessing in disguise. The better run, better funded Twitter job boards will now have a barrier to entry in place that will protect them from new competitors who aren’t able or willing to pay the fee. Also, I have to believe that Twitter will likely be motivated to take care of its paying clients so the service and reliability it delivers to the Twitter job boards will probably improve.
So are the Twitter job boards dead? Hardly. Hurt? Sure. But the good ones will survive and, long-term, perhaps even thrive.