Twitter Suspends UberTwitter And Twidroyd For Violating Policies

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/18/twitter-suspends-ubermedia-clients-ubertwitter-and-twidroyd-for-violating-policies/

by warp • 15 years ago

117 68 15 years ago

techcrunch.com

ajg1977• 15 years ago

"We haven't changed our policies, we're just enforcing them differently" - the 2011 catchphrase for platform providers

Samuel_Michon4• 15 years ago

According to Twitter, the measure was taken after months of warnings:

"[Twitter] had conversations with UberMedia, the developer of these applications, about policy violations since April 2010"

"[S]everal applications, including UberTwitter, twidroyd and UberCurrent, [...] have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways. These violations include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money."

abraham2• 15 years ago

UberMedia CEO Bill Gross says these are new issues Twitter never brought up before:

“We just talked to Twitter and discussed the various issues they raise. It took us by surprise because they didn’t raise them before."

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/18/ubermedia-bill-gross-twitte...

c23• 15 years ago

2010 was the year to invest in platforms. 2011 is the year to invest elsewhere. So long Facebook, Twitter, Apple - I no longer trust your platforms enough to put any significant resources into development.

It's time to end the walled garden resurgence and the best way to do that is on the ground floor.

rimantas• 15 years ago

More like 2011 is a year of over-generalizations. Good luck trying to find anything you can trust anyway.

code_duck2• 15 years ago

I don't know about the year-by-year breakdown, but that's exactly how I feel currently.

The platforms I've built for are each in the process of betraying their developers. I've done well with them so far but it's absolutely time to build independent businesses.

joe_the_user2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure this generalization applies to the same degrees to Apple, Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter especially has a hard platform to monetize to begin with - tweets are about all it has and so can't let someone hijack them even a little bit.

Twitter seems like the best "citizen of the open Internet" here. Distantly followed by Facebook, then with Apple being a foe openness as far as I can see.

jcapote• 15 years ago

This is curiously close to the release date of their latest twitter app.

blocke• 15 years ago

Because it's not like they haven't had an official client on that platform for many months now...

alphadog• 15 years ago

Here's a link to the official Twitter statement: http://support.twitter.com/articles/452648-i-m-having-proble...

No clue to whether this is a permanent suspension - or what? I suspect it is since they marketed their apps at the end.

marketer• 15 years ago

This is what you have to deal with as a developer on the Twitter platform. Their policies have become so bloated and far-reaching that most apps are in violation.

jjclarkson• 15 years ago

This is uncool. So I have an Android 1.6 phone. I use Twidroyd and the named alternative, the official Twitter app is for devices on Android 2.1 or later. I also have no plans to change my phone for at least another year. Maybe that's just me, but I doubt it.

veeti• 15 years ago

What about Plume/Touiteur?

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.levelup.touiteur&#...

rue• 15 years ago

There's an abundance of Twitter clients for Android, or you can use the mobile web version. I use TweetDeck.

barredo• 15 years ago

Twicca doesn't support 1.6?

colomon• 15 years ago

I just tried twidroyd, and my feed for the last three hours only contains these two tweets:

Support: UberTwitter, twidroyd, and UberCurrent have been suspended due to policy violations. Read more here: http://t.co/HHGa9k1

Support: Want to keep using Twitter on your phone? Download an official Twitter client here: http://t.co/rxwSYuW

citricsquid• 15 years ago

Wait, so Twitter support did that? I guess they can but it seems slightly sleezy.

Pyrodogg2• 15 years ago

Yes. Apparently if you keep trying to make api calls with a banned app they keep feeding you these tweets.

StavrosK4• 15 years ago

On the contrary, how would most people know if it weren't for those tweets? Granted, we were also emailed, but this seems like good sense.

albedoa2• 15 years ago

Why does that seem sleazy?

nhangen2• 15 years ago

Incredibly sleazy, especially since these clients are soon to be fixed and probably brought back into the API.

I'm all for enforcing a license, but I don't think that last line was necessary.

corin_• 15 years ago

Would imagine that one of (possibly the only?) violation for UberTwitter is the trademark violation. They had already been forced to use @UberTwiter (without the double 't') for this reason.

Sucks from a user's point of view, UberTwitter is by far the best client for Blackberry, SO much better than Twitter's frankly terrible official app.

metageek• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure that, if UberTwitter is a violation, so is UberTwiter. The standard isn't "is spelled the same"; it's "is likely to confuse the customer".

duskwuff• 15 years ago

Word on the street is that those clients may have been doing some sketchy things ("changing tweets to monetize... privacy issues with DMs"):

http://twitter.com/#!/marshallk/status/38679317034565632

bradleyjoyce• 15 years ago

why does the TechCrunch story get upvoted more than the original source?

gloob• 15 years ago

Because, contrary to the posturing that happens on the site, people still prefer to read a gossip rag instead of actually see what's happened?

hornokplease• 15 years ago

To be fair, the TechCrunch story has more information than Twitter itself provided in their initial statement (with regards to the 'why' of the suspensions).

That said, I submitted the source page but it failed to reach the front page for some reason:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2236675

bretthellman• 15 years ago

Traffic

commandar3• 15 years ago

This is a really crappy way for Twitter to have handled this as far as their users are concerned. Somebody over at reddit posted a screencap of an email that Twitter's apparently sending out to users of these apps, and it largely screamed of FUD to me:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/fo203/twidroyd_susp...

There are also indications that it's not just UberTwitter and Twidroyd, but all of UberMedia's apps that have been blocked. Almost makes me think that the FUD aspect may have been intended.

EDIT:

Looks like at least some of their properties, like EchoFon have survived.

I still don't like Twitter hanging end users out to dry like this, though.

tptacek2• 15 years ago

If Twitter bans modifying tweets for monetization and told the company to stop, or if the company actually was playing fast and loose with privacy issues, then it seems to me it's not Twitter who left anyone hanging out to dry.

commandar3• 15 years ago

A. It's still not clear exactly what the issues were. Having use the app, I can't think of where Twidroyd steps on those toes. (I suspect that in its case Twitter is throwing a fit about trademark).

B. Suddenly cutting off two apps that are among the most popular on their platforms without prior warning is crappy for users. Publicly issue a drop dead date to fix the problems to the developers, and give your users a chance to be ready for things first.

eli• 15 years ago

Anybody know what "changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money" actually means in this case?

Were they inserting affiliate IDs into Amazon links or something?

mxavier• 15 years ago

Second. I use twitdroyd (mostly for reading tweets), but I'd be pretty pissed if they actively modify my tweets. I wish the article would be more specific that.

KaeseEs• 15 years ago

I got an android phone recently and started using twidroyd yesterday. The first time I tried to tweet from my phone, when I hit 'done' a 30-char-or-so ad for Twidroyd was appended onto my (20-char-or-so) tweet. I was rather irked that I had to go back into the text edit box to delete it. I uninstalled the app immediately (thanks VM for not locking down the base ROM to prevent removing this default app, I guess) so I don't know whether this is only first-use behavior or persistent, but it is rather sleazy and annoying and I don't blame Twitter for banning them for this sort of horsecrap in the slightest.

ssclafani• 15 years ago

From Bill Gross, founder of UberMedia:

"Twitter has requested that we make some small changes to our clients, which we are doing right now, & we will be back live again asap."

http://twitter.com/Bill_Gross/status/38692931690954752

StavrosK4• 15 years ago

I have a feeling that these changes were requested many times and a long time ago...

Samuel_Michon4• 15 years ago

Small changes that they apparently didn't want to make, if it took them ten months to get started. I guess getting cut off is quite motivating.

According to Twitter, UberMedia infused twitter streams in their apps with ads. Turning off that 'feature' is probably trivial, but if that's UberMedia's business model, I can understand why they're hesitant to do so.

l0nwlf• 15 years ago

> According to Twitter, UberMedia infused twitter streams in their apps with ads.

But what problem should twitter be having ? If public dislike the ads they won't use it probably. If they are doing so, they are probably OK with it. There are lots of ads-free client out there.

chrismiller• 15 years ago

Anyone else notice that #Twittermobile is a promoted trend? Twitter are really pushing their own app today.

ENOTTY• 15 years ago

Bill Gross on the alleged violations:

Trademark infringement: "UberTwitter will change its name to UberSocial."

Privacy issues: "The privacy issues are related to handling Tweets longer than 140 characters." This information, combined with "privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters" (from Twitter) makes me think that DMs and protected Tweets greater than 140 characters were passed to a site like TwitLonger, which makes the full text accessible by a URL. That site then showed the message to anybody who had the URL without any account authentication.

Monetization: Twitter believed UberMedia used affiliate links, which Gross disputes.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/18/ubermedia-bill-gross-twitte...

TheAmazingIdiot• 15 years ago

So part of the problem is a complaint of trademark dilution? How about this name for a twitter client:

Birdfeed.

olivercameron• 15 years ago

R.I.P. Birdfeed (http://birdfeedapp.com).

akent• 15 years ago

Misleading subject line on the email from Twitter about this: "Important information about your Twitter application" (emphasis mine).

Turns out it wasn't about my application at all, it was twidroyd. Way to get my attention though.

mikey_p• 15 years ago

Affected by this and so annoyed, I'm about to delete my twitter account, so I wanted to backup my tweets, and found http://pongsocket.com/tweetnest/ which seems to do the job nicely.

rick888• 15 years ago

This is why you shouldn't rely so heavily on third-party services for your business. Twitter can either change policies to make it so you can no longer make money or just out-right compete with you and put you out of business.

Twitter Suspends UberTwitter And Twidroyd For Violating Policies

Related Stories