News that Twitter had blocked popular Twitter Apps Ubertwitter and Twidroyd spread very quickly yesterday. The reason? Twitter said that these apps were violating it's policies and trademarks. Ubermedia, the parent company of these applications, has recently been getting pretty serious about being a major Twitter player. It has bought up several of the more popular Twitter Applications, to include Echophone, Twidroyd and just last week picked up wildly popular Tweetdeck. According to Seesmic's, Loic Le Meur, that is over 20% of all Twitter traffic now being controlled by one company. One company, that isn't Twitter, by the way . . . . So does Twitter feel threatened by such a company, or is this really all about not following the rules?
Twitter had this to say about suspending Ubermedia's Applications.
We ask all developers in the Twitter ecosystem to abide by a simple set of rules that are in the interests of our users, as well as the health and vitality of the platform as a whole.
We often take actions to enforce these rules; in fact, on an average day we turn off more than one hundred services that violate our API rules of the road. This keeps the ecosystem fair for everyone.
Today we suspended several applications, including UberTwitter, twidroyd and UberCurrent, which 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.
We’ve had conversations with UberMedia, the developer of these applications, about policy violations since April 2010, when they first launched under the name TweetUp – a term commonly used by Twitter users and a trademark violation. We continue to be in contact with UberMedia and hope that they will bring the suspended applications into compliance with our policies soon.
So what is up here? Is this simply a case of a company violating the terms of service? Or is it something else? If Twitter is going to go after these folks for using Names that include Tweet, or Twit to describe their applications, this circus is going to be in town for a while.
Ubermedia's Bill Gross said this to Techcrunch,
Early Friday morning, Twitter shut off access to its service by several of our Twitter client applications: UberTwitter, Twidroyd, and UberCurrent. Twitter then notified us that they believed we were in violation of several provisions of their terms of service.
We were immediately in touch with Twitter, and the changes they asked us to make were very small. As a result, we have completed the changes, and new apps are currently being posted to their respective stores. Twitter has assured us that as soon as those changes were complete, they would reactivate our applications.
Twitter also asked us to modify the name of UberTwitter. We began a process of changing the name three weeks ago by polling our users, and we’ve decided based on their input to change the product name to UberSocial, which we completed today.
To our millions of loyal users, we appreciate your patience during this temporary period. We look forward to continuing our innovations on the Twitter platform.
So it sounds as if you own a Blackberry and Ubertwitter is your choice for Twitter, all will be well in a couple of days. If you use Twidroyd on your Android based device, ditto. But long term, there might be a little more at play here in my opinion. Who really uses Twitter's HTML services once they sign up? And Twitter's app on my Nexus is a joke compared to Seemic, Twidroyd, and in my opinion, they all could learn a lot from Tweetdeck. And I use Tweetdeck almost exclusely from my desktop. Sure it's been this way for a while! Why would Twitter suddenly have a problem with all these apps that have basically made it as popular as it is? I'm thinking Twitter might be feeling just a little uncomfortable with the fact that one company now controls a significant amount of Twitter Traffic. Twitter is trying hard with a new CEO to make some money. I think there is a strategy at play here that really has less to do with violations of terms of service and more about branding and control.
Buds who Blog