Twitter orders app developer to cease and desist

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 12 August 2009 17:47

Your IT - Home IT

People have got used to Apple telling iPhone app developers to get stuffed, but now Twitter is beating some third party app developers with a big legal stick.

Apple has stirred up some pretty seriously geeky controversy by blaming Hitler for an EFF iPhone app ban, deciding that South Park wallpaper and a trouserless Bill Clinton were potentially offensive, while at the same time thinking a game that you win by shaking a baby to death was fine in the App Store.

Now, it seems, that Twitter wants to get in on the act as far as telling third party application developers what is, and isn't, acceptable. Unlike the barmy Apple corps, Twitter might have a point.

Not that having a point ever made any difference to a good story, of course. So what exactly is happening in the strange case of Twitter versus My Twitter Butler?

Well, Twitter has been doing what it can of late to crack down on spam including a recent well publicised willy waving follower cull.

What's more, it claims that any software which "facilitates aggressive and automatic following to Twitter users" violates the Twitter Terms of Service. All of which seems perfectly fair if you happen to be an ordinary Twitter user.

If you are into Twitter for the marketing business, you might think differently though. Which is where My Twitter Butler, the third party application concerned, comes into play.

My Twitter Butler is a Windows XP app which allows anyone to automatically follow Twitter users based upon the keywords that they tweet. It also throws in the ability to send 'direct message broadcasts' (also known as spam in good old fashioned English) to all those followers at the same time.

If that were not bad enough, from the non-marketing user perspective, My Twitter Butler also claims to be able to make 20,000 API calls an hour from the desktop, circumventing the 100 API calls per hour per account limit.

By connecting directly to the Twitter API stream it allows users to register multiple accounts and search for 4 keywords in real time across each account, with automatic follow limits of up to 400 per keyword.

What does the developer concerned have to say in his defence? And what is the Twitter lawyer demanding he do? Find out on the next page.

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