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Controversy brews over Twitter harassment policy
A controversy surrounding Twitter’s terms of service erupted after popular blogger Ariel Waldman wrote that she had been harassed via Twitter for over a year and the company did nothing to stop it. According to Ars Technica, Twitter did remove some offending posts from the public timeline last year after Waldman complained. However, more recent tweets and the offending user’s account were not removed.
In a post to the official company blog co-founder Biz Stone responded saying that “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content.” Waldman contends that Twitter’s terms of service, which were borrowed from Flickr, place an obligation on the company to police what she feels is an online community. Twitter announce it is reviewing its terms.
On the legal front, internet lawyer John Dozier Jr. told Wired that “Twitter may have risked its immunity under the Communications Decency Act the moment it ‘edited’ or altered content on the site.” However, Denise Howell, also an internet lawyer, blogger, and podcaster, writes that Twitter has done nothing to forfeit its protection under the law.
Twitter: ‘We’re not sure what’s happening’
In an untitled and verbose blog post yesterday, Twitter admitted it does not know what is causing its frequent service outages and asked for patience from users. “We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening.”
CNet’s Dave Rosenberg (@daveofdoom) warns Twitter that if it can’t keep its service up, it will suffer the fate of Friendster.
Twitter raises $15 million in new funding round
GigaOm reports that Twitter has completed a new round of venture capital funding. “The update is that Twitter reached an agreement with investors today to raise $15 million in funding at around $80 million pre-money valuation.” TechCrunch speculates that the VC firm in question is Spark Capital.
Twitter outage spurs rebuke from bloggers, contest
Twitter suffered another serious outage yesterday sparking a strong wave of criticism from bloggers.
One frequent complaint was Twitter’s lack of communications with users during outages. “[H]ow about just having enough respect for your users to let us know what’s going on, asked TechCrunch. Meanwhile VentureBeat noted that during major outages the official blog is rarely updated and it’s unclear to users where else to look for official information. Twitter finally posted a terse note on its blog taking responsibility for the outage.
Meanwhile, CNET’s Molly Wood (@mollywood) launched a contest to build a Twitter competitor. “I have had it with this Twitter situation,” she wrote. After consulting with software engineers, Wood is convinced that a better-scaling Twitter analog can be built in hours. To entice someone to build it, she offered some incentives:
I will go there, for a test period of not more than 30 days, and I will beg all of my followers to join me for this test period (as of this writing, a nice round 6,700). My colleague, Tom Merritt, says he’ll go there, too, and hopefully bring his followers along for the scalability test. I’ll ask everyone else I know on Twitter to come along (I’m talking to you, Leo Laporte), and we’ll see if it’s really as hard as all that to build a Twitter that can stand up to the awesome pressure of being Twitter.
The prize also includes other random gifts including a windbreaker.
Boycott of Twitter scheduled for tomorrow
Disgruntled Twitter users are planning a boycott of the service tomorrow, May 21st. According to one of the organizers, Andrew Dobrow (@anjrued), he and others have been frustrated with Twitter’s frequent outages. “As a result, a bunch of us Twitter power users were using FriendFeed to discuss a way to hit Twitter where it hurts in order to send a message to the powers that be.” Some like Jennifer Leggio (@mediaphyter) believe the boycott will be self-defeating. “We get what we pay for. Unless those boycotting have made significant financial contributions to the server upkeep of Twitter I really don’t want to hear it from them.” Do you think a boycott of Twitter is constructive or not?
When Obama wins Twitter will implode
In what has become an all-too-common occurrence, Twitter was down again yesterday. LAist and Mashable speculated that the outage was caused by heavy traffic following John Edward’s endorsement of Barrack Obama. In a post to its official blog, Twitter said the interruption was “not entirely to do with the Democrats, Space Aliens, Mysterious Men in Black, or Arugula.” Whatever the case, the Industry Standard writes that the schtick is getting old.
Summize ties itself to Twitter, introduces local search
Search engine Summize has officially refocused its business model on Twitter search, according to Masahable. It has also just introduced local search. “For example, search for ‘McCain near:’phonix az’ and you can see what people in the GOP’s Presidential Candidate’s home state are tweeting about him. You can also access the local search via the Advanced Options page of Summize so you don’t have to memorize the syntax.” Does it make good business sense to tie your business model to Twitter? Read the story.
MySpace to make profiles, friends portable to Twitter
MySpace has announced a new data portability initiative that will allow its users to easily use their profile on other sites, including Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. “One neat trick is that any time you update your photo or other information on MySpace it will instantly be updated on the sites on which you placed the data.” While the feature will not be available for weeks, and details are still sketchy, it seems like users will also have the ability to export “friends” from MySpace to other services. This would make it easy for users to take their social network with them from service to service. Read the story.
Copyright and Twitter
The Blog Herald runs a feature by Plagiarism Today’s Jonathan Bailey on copyright and Twitter. Bottom line: The 140-character limit means tweets will rarely be sufficiently creative to fall under copyright (cf. @hotdogsladies) or worth suing over. “That being said … a collection of tweets from the same person could be copyrightable if they could be seen as one large work broken apart over many entries.” The article also covers posting links to illegal content, defamation, and trademark. Read the story.
Shatner sighting leads to JetBlue Twitter scare
Blogger Jonathan Fields (@jonathanfields) recounts that after he tweeted his sighting of William Shatner at the JetBlue terminal in NYC, he was immediately followed @jetblue on Twitter. This freaked him out and he tweeted same. Of course, JetBlue messaged him with an apology and an explanation and this led to an extensive an interesting exchange that details JetBlue’s corporate communications strategy on Twitter. Fields writes, “This level of conversation from a multi-billion dollar company was just too much to stomach.” But isn’t transparency and humanity exactly what we want more of from corporations? Read the story.
With outages, Twitter headed down the AOL path?
Twitter was on the rocks yesterday, giving visitors code 500 internal server errors. This comes on the heels of a major outage two weeks ago that, to the frustration of many, was barely acknowledged by the company. This time Twitter made an effort an effort to keep users informed on its blog, here and here.
News.com has an excellent essay by Charles Cooper drawing a parallel between Twitter’s troubles and outages suffered by high-flying AOL in the mid-90s. “In August 1996, America Online got in even bigger trouble after going dark for 19 hours.How big a deal was it? Consider this: AOL’s outage was the lead news item on the evening news programs for ABC, NBC, and CBS. If you thought the grumbling about Twitter was bad, remember that AOL back then had more than 5 million subscribers and they were not a happy lot.” Read the story.
Twitter dumping Ruby on Rails?
Shortly after eWeek published an article arguing that “Twitter’s reliance on Ruby and Ruby on Rails proves the language’s resilience,” newsbreaker TechCruch reported that “After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java[.]” For non-geeks: Ruby on Rails is a way to write applications in a fast and easy manner, and the system has a devoted following. However, there have always been questions about whether a Rails application could scale to handle millions of users. Twitter’s hiccups have Rails’ devotees and detractors in a tizzy. Read the story.
How much is a Twitter follower worth?
The L.A. Times ponders today how much a Twitter follower is worth. “The service is becoming a valuable way to instantly broadcast promotional material, draw people’s attention to cultural or political activities, and just basically wield power and influence. So followers in a very real sense equal money.” Another valuable benefit to many followers not mentioned is the “instant focus group” or crowdsourcing effect. So the questions are: How much would you have to pay to someone with 1,000 followers to send out your message? (Yuck! Please don’t ever let this happen.) And how much would you pay people to follow you? The L.A. Times writer would pay a dime a follower. He should read Clay Shirky on micropayments. Read the story.
Tokyo most active city on Twitter, SF #2
ReadWriteWeb reports that Twitter is really blowing up in Japan. A Japanese version of the site was launched earlier this month after the company realized that a large portion of its users were coming from Japan. “[T]he signs are that Japanese Twitter usage is set to explode in popularity - Twitterlocal shows that Tokyo is currently by far the city with the most Twitter usage.” San Francisco comes in at number two. Read the story.
One thing clear about the numbers: they’re going up
Internet monitoring group Hitwise has release an analysis of Twitter that counts it as still a niche site, but with incredible growth. “Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter.com are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.” Read the story.
TechCrunch downplays those numbers “since so much of the action on Twitter occurs via mobile phones, instant messaging and desktop clients … most active users rarely visit the website.” TechCrunch puts forth its own numbers from a “source close to the company”: Total Users: 1+ million, Total Active Users: 200,000 per week, Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day. Read the story.
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