On 5/30/09 7:06 PM, David M. Wilson wrote:
In comment to your TOS question: Twitter as a company seem a whole lot
more liberal (and realistic) when it comes to their data. I think I
may have even read this somewhere semiofficial in the past. Profile
information itself is also available to the public, and so, keeping a
local cache is probably no more harmful (from Twitter's perspective)
than what happens when a search engine crawls a user's profile page.
Compare and contrast to Facebook's approach. :P
Yeah, Facebook has very strict guidelines as to what you can cache, how
long you can cache it, and I'm almost positive they have a
no-redistribute policy.
I can totally understand Twitter not allowing third-party API consumers
to redistribute data retrieved by the API - their valuation probably
relies greatly on the number of requests ("hits") they receive - if a
third-party service adds a layer of indirection in front of Twitter,
then that traffic is no longer hitting Twitter directly which makes them
appear less active than they really are.
Can someone either point to the clause in the Twitter TOS that says a
third-party application can redistribute Twitter data to other services
directly, or can someone from Twitter issue an official statement to
this effect? Or, equally useful would be a statement that clearly
states that this would be forbidden ... so I know not to waste my time
even thinking about this. :-)
--
Dossy Shiobara | do...@panoptic.com | http://dossy.org/
Panoptic Computer Network | http://panoptic.com/
"He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own
folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)
