We’ve all heard the stories about Apple rejecting apps from the iTunes App Store for arbitrary reasons. Now Twitter is raising some hackles for shutting down accounts for no good reason. In this case, the accounts belong to StatTweets, which was created by Robbie Allen, the developer behind sports stat site StatSheet. StatTweets was a way to get sports scores and updates about your favorite NBA, NFL, and college teams.
What did Allen do wrong? Twitter cited violations to its terms of service including “copyright infringement,” “mass account creation,” and “squatting” (you can read all the details on the StatSheet blog). It was probably the second issue that got him into hot water. Over the course of a weekend, he and his wife (manually) created 650 Twitter accounts, one for each team, with each account drawing data from that team’s page on StatSheet. It probably looked like spam to Twitter, but simply looking at some of the accounts would show that they were not spam.
In fact, all together the accounts attracted 63,000 followers, which indicates that some people found them useful. Twitter quickly became the second-largest referring site to StatSheet before the shutdowns. While he did create many accounts, each of those accounts was far more useful to sports fans of particular teams than one giant stream of updates from 650 different teams. So it seems counter-productive in this case to enforce that rule.
As far as the copyright issue, each StatTweets account used an official team logo for its avatar, which may or may not be actual copyright infringement and which he is certainly not alone in doing. Regardless, he offered to take down the logos if that was the issue. And Twitter’s trademark policy indicates that infringing accounts “created to help a community or provide information” would be given an opportunity to make changes before the accounts are deleted. Allen says he never got that chance.
The squatting violation refers to inactive accounts he is supposedly sitting on like those for college football teams. The reason those accounts are inactive, however, is because college football season is over.
Twitter support might be too overwhelmed to deal with this case, or maybe they are still trying to teach Oprah and her fans how to Tweet properly. In the meantime, this is Allen’s livelihood. (If you want to show your support, retweet this message). Twitter needs to treat its developers with some more respect because they are the ones creating some of the most compelling data streams and apps around the service.
Apple can still get away with making life hard for developers because, seriously, where else are they going to go? Twitter might feel like it is in the same boat, but it is not. There are plenty of other real-time streams to wade in.
Hmmm
If your “hmmm” was in reference to seeing why Twitter shut him down for having 650 accounts, but also seeing how the 650 accounts were different and would serve different audiences with different content, then I agree with you.
Seems to me Twitter is potentially the best opt-in hyper-targeting tool out there and there will be a wave of sites/companies that try something similar.
How do they do that and not get shut down by an overworked Twitter support team?
max of 3 accounts per a user I believe. That 650 (manual really? that’s like probably 10+ hours) accounts are definitely what got them in trouble.
They’re having problems with squatters who think they can resell the twitter pages for money. Happened in early days of GMail with people selling invites and usernames for upwards of 20 usd a piece.
Twitter is a fad. This irc 2.0 will fade within a year.
Right about other startups please.
Your comment is write on. Insightful +1
Hormel, you’re rong about this one, but you are write to ask him to right about the others.
You need some grammer lessons… tard
‘grammer’ lessons…idiot.
consider the concept of irony.
The internet is a fad too. Please talk about something else.
Twitter is a fad. This irc 2.0 will fade within a year.
Write about other startups please.
bad move by twitter. they seem to be favoring the brands over the developers who help make their service.
Exactly, and it’s about time TM law be obliterated. You can’t do anything on the internet without being sued by a corporation. It has gone completely overboard in the past 2 years, and no one sees it. Just by creating a twitter name, that may have a word or phrase in it that is trademarked a big hotshot douchebag lawyer will see it and say “hey I can make some capital if I sue this little guy, and my big company can appreciate me again.”
So he presses a button, and you get a big fat C&D threatening you for hundreds of thousands of dollars. You being just a person may write the lawyer “suck my balls.” Now you have upset an egomaniac, who will then investigate you and try to take you to court. Merely for pointing out the fact that he needs to suck on your balls.
There is very little freedom in the current state of the internet. It has been taken over by the big corporations, who will eat everything up. You can’t even express your hatred for companies without them trying to sue you. No one can fight these lawyers, as they already have groundwork layed with UDRP processes.
Someone please to drag twitter into the deadpool by their hair kicking and screaming
There is a similar application called http://sportytweets.com/. It scrapes news and posts links about your favorite teams. They are also using an account per team.
I’d kick anyone’s ass out who created 650 accounts too. It prevents the proper stakeholders from claiming those twitter accounts. Its 650 accounts with one voice.
He could read the twitter firehose and setup 650 subsections on his main site. There were many other ways to do it.
Yeah, because having to visit external sites is what makes Twitter great right? How else could he have done it?
I’m sure he was using a naming convention that didn’t keep teams from claiming their ‘own’ user accounts. Right?
In either case, Twitter needs to be more friendly to their developer community. We are driving traffic to and through their channels. We are extending the function of twitter. Jack Dorsey has said twitter is a utility, not a micro-blogging platform, so let us create that utility with all the freedoms you originally intended.
I imagine this was prompted by a complaint. Twitter does seem to favor big-whigs and celebs in matters of TOS.
Why isn’t anybody asking why Twitter is getting involved with the content of names at all? I think this is a signal that their plans are not to be a messaging platform but a content provider. There’s really no reason for them to quibble here at all unless it conflicts with their business model.
why can’t it be both?
They’re scared that squatters will come about due to popularity. And they’re still in the honeymoon period so they want people to get good and proper names rather than BearsFan2939
Makes sense also since they’re monetization strategy is probably to attract big companies and teams to the service and charge them a nominal fee for special privileges.
I also saw twitter account for “Tweexchange” was also suspended ?
That one I agree with. Which is hard for me to say as a twitter developer. But user accounts should not be hoarded and sold, it goes against all ideals of community.
Gag me with your “ideals of community.” Twitter is a business. Thinking otherwise is simply naive.
So what is the reason? What am I missing here?
“Over the course of a weekend, he and his wife (manually) created 650 Twitter accounts, one for each team, with each account drawing data from that team’s page on StatSheet”
Definitely sounds like abuse to me. Good for Twitter.
“he and his wife (manually) created 650 Twitter accounts,…”
Yeah, right, I bet they used iMacros or something similar. I would
Wait a second … you are comparing Twitter to Apples policies on the app store because a developer created 650 twitter accounts … ?
Thats spammy and he deserves to be booted.
He created twitter accounts for every college football team … aren’t those names and/or logos trademarked ? Its against twitter TOS to use a trademarked name that you don’t own. Thats how we (The company I work for) managed to regain access to a few twitter accounts that people jacked.
I fail to see why people are upset over this. The developer clearly broke Twitters TOS and got suspended for it.
Nothing more to see here, move along.
What exactly is spammy about it?
And please show me where “CelticsStats” is trademarked? Are you saying no one can have a username on Twitter with the word “Celtics” in it and talk about the Boston Celtics??
And 650 accounts, out of how many millions? If Robbie took the time to create the accounts, keeps them fed with good data and people are following – should be a total non-issue for twitter!
When you have a username that contains the trademarked name AND you are publishing copyrighted stats … then they can send a C&D to twitter asking for it to be shutdown. If they choose not to shut it down, they will be in for legal trouble.
Do I agree with copyrighting stats … hell no, but it is what it is.
Beyond that, if you don’t understand how creating 650 user accounts can be looked at as a spammy action … welp …
How the hell can stats be copyritten? They’re STATS! That’s like copyrighting the weather!
I’ll come back and finish this post later, I’m going to copyright the weather…
@Justyn – This wouldn’t let me reply to you, so the thread is all fucked up.
Anyway .. if you don’t believe me that they can copyright and enforce copyrights on sport stats … go post all the scores from MLB on your blog and watch how quickly you get a C&D from them.
Again, I think its BS that they are allowed to do it … but they somehow pull it off.
Joseph: How do you explain this, then?
http://www.tech...8/1850214.shtml
I believe you, I just think it’s bullshit. Guess what, Aramis Ramirez has a .352 batting average. I’m infringing? Crazy talk.
Anyway, it would be awesome to see Twitter go to bat for the ‘little’ guy in cases like these. They are not responsible for any content (cannot be held liable), their only TOS item that’s relevant here is impersonation, which Robbie is clearly not doing. At least let him change the logos.
Consider the possibility that their business model is exactly to be “responsible for any content.”
@EH Excellent! Glad the courts got smart with it. I don’t follow sports so it was easy for me to miss that ruling. Its total BS that they even could try to claim copyright on the stats.
Using logos from the teams without permission could cause legal issues.
I still think the developer of this app was being spammy with creating 650 accounts.
I am facing similar issue.
I used to own the account ‘f1′ where I used to put all the Formula1 related details and live tweetcast during the race. I have 4000+ followers and it was a very good source of communicating with fans.
3 weeks ago, Twitter suspended the account. When I asked for a reason, I got a auto-generated response after 2 weeks. I am not violating any terms and conditions as ‘f1′ is not a trademark and clearly I am not impersonating Formula1 as the bio refers a link to my blog.
Not cool. They have got to start working with developers and account holders on these issues. I would be livid if after all the work I did developing a business based on twitter was shut off with no opportunity to resolve.
Here is the reply to Twitter that I sent. I am explaining how I am not violating any TOS and not infringing copyright – http://veetrag....er-suspends-f1/
How much money do you have? There’s your answer.
They just like to do that, the more issues, give them more press coverage. They never showed much respect to user accounts, this is not news. Just arrogant and self-righteous, as usual, as always.
The first negative feed for Twitter on TC. How surprising?
Funny how media and press attention makes a business bigger than who they are. And those pesky marketers become instant experts.
What baffles me in this case is that, why don’t developers ask permission and get approved? This way, they don’t jeopardize their existence on these fickle networks.
Actually I did ask. I contacted Twitter’s bizdev email address back in November…twice. No response.
Maybe so, but the onus is still on you to network your way in and establish communication. As a longtime developer whose been in the same boat as you, getting through to a biz-dev department as hot as Twitter takes a helluva lot more than 2 emails.
If your business relies on someone else’s platform, well, that’s dangerous enough.
But if your business plan REQUIRES you to violate the TOS of the very platform your business is built upon… maybe there should be a Darwin Award for startups.
The StatSheet Network doesn’t require the existence of StatTweets. I was just taking advantage of an opportunity to promote StatSheet.com. That was the #1 goal of StatTweets from the beginning. Shutting down StatTweets doesn’t shut down StatSheet.
Did you look at this guy’s sites? He is basically ripping off copyrighted football and basketball information and then cries fowl when Twitter wisely suspends his accounts.
Look of NFL, NBA, MLB licensees to provide similar Twitter apps soon.
Eh? I’ve paid for everything you see on StatSheet and StatTweets. I’m not ripping off anyone. Believe me, it is EXPENSIVE, but at least I’m legit.
I believe, Twitter must have at least contacted Robbie to get this sorted. Twitter needs to realize that folks like Robbie are one of the many reasons for its astounding growth. To shut them off abrasively like that is purely distasteful.
They (the NFL) did the same to the developer of Twootball. They had him shut his site.
Developers are not there to steal Twitter’s thunder. Developers are of a different breed. They ought not to be treated like spammers in spite of their transgressions.
yeah twitter is imazing, but make 650 accounts it crazy, like register domains for sale
Like someone already commented… http://sportytweets.com/ does the exact same thing. Why haven’t they been shutdown too?
It is like Apple.. because they also do this kind of crap in the app store too.
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Ought to be plenty of room in sandbox for all parties.
They can do whatever they want and the only way to fight back is to take action.
I would contact another microblog network and explain you need 650 accounts and than ask for approval. They might be interested in some extra buzz
Send out some smart press releases and it would very interesting to see how far the public dissaproval reach….
It’s enough to drive people to Plurk.
Am I a twit because I use Twitter?
I am glad TwitCrunch exists, otherwise I wouldn’t have anywhere to go for all my Twit news.
Money speaks louder than developers who Twitter opened the API to for free traffic during the “growing” years.
Look for trademarked material and accounts from the MLB, NFL, NHL, NCAA soon. Better yet a exact copy of StatTweets that is built by someone and sponsored by someone at Federated Media. Listen…Federated Media is in BED with Twitter. Dont you see it? How else would they get a CLICKABLE space on Twitters homepage to promote Exectweets and MarchTweetness? Sure now, there are clickable spaces for TweetDeck and others..but TweetDeck has same VC money as Twitter. This isnt that hard to figure out.
A while ago (in 07 or 08), I remember reading about how Twitter was trying to stay out of any legal trouble because it was a small company, remembered it was something coming from @ev in a personal convo or something.
I guess Twitter is looking out for themselves, especially if they got a C & D from the appropriate organizations.
It would be nicer if they were more open to dialogue though… giving the developer a more satisfying/non-automated response would prevent a lot of bad press.
Then again stuff like this is a good warning for developers so its good that people are talking about the issue openly on blogs.
Bummer, there goes Tweet as we know it!
RT
http://www.anonymity.ru.tc
From the December 08 archives, a similar matter involving the username ‘celtics’ that was taken away: http://blog.ste...y-on-usernames/
Stat Tweets should work with Shoutem and build there own micro-blog. They can bring over there 60,000 audience. If not, clone baby, clone.
Shoutem: http://www.shoutem.com/video/
Maybe this could be Twitter’s revenue model. 3 accounts is free. 65 accounts will be $65 a month. 650 accounts will be $650 a month.
People who complain about the fake recession are losers. I can’t see recession. What? me worry? noooo http://iamned.com/blog/ Twitter.com may already be worth 14.5 billion, but not a bubble.
I hear Apple, I think love/hate relationship at its finest. Been an Apple user since 82, never owned a PC, but sometimes I wonder who the hec is making these lameO calls. Not just on the twitter thing, but lots of things. Torn between 2 emotions, brilliant brand, and big bad bully. My battle scar from growing my baby start up Oddpodz.com still hurts.
Twitter’s probably got some detection tool that auto shuts down accounts where more than 3 are opened from the same IP. Do you think they go through all the accounts manually to see who’s being naughty? They might, but somehow I doubt it.