I'm only sending this to the Twitter-Dev list and not distributing the information to a wider audience but I think the Twitter 3rd party dev community should be aware of a development.
Karen Webb the lawyer for Twitter inc has clearly stated that I will NOT be able to change my applications name from www.MyTwitterButler.com <http://www.mytwitterbutler.com/> to www.MyTweetButler.com <http://www.mytweetbutler.com/> and contrary to Biz Stones blog post of July 1st 2009 http://blog.twitter.com/2009/07/may-tweets-be-with-you.html#links Twitters lawyers will be pursuing domain names and applications with both the word "Twitter" and with the word "Tweet" in their domain. The conference call basically fell apart when I realized that the lawyer thought my application did something magical to the API and allowed a twitter account (eg @Tweet_Tools) to follow more people in a day than the API was programmed to allow. Likewise the application could send no more direct messages per day than the AP allows. - I don't have an answer about the longer term outcome. I was hoping this was going to be solved with a few 15 minute phone calls BUT it doesn't appear that this is going to be possible. I've asked for the dialog to move to email rather than voice and also made Twitter Inc aware I'm going to be overseas from next week until the 7th of September so I don't expect to make an update until after this date. I appreciate not everyone in the twitter-development community thinks my application should be allowed all I'm asking for is a clear definition of the rules - if you don't want us to use Tweet or the API in a certain way then don't write blog posts that say it's ok (or give code demos at dev-nest meetup events for things you now say the API isn't to be used for). Either way I think the dev community needs to know that....changing your apps name to TweetX etc (even if the term Tweet was coined by the user community) isn't going to be allowed by Twitter. That's until after the 7th of Sept. Regards, Dean Collins d...@mytwitterbutler.com <mailto:d...@mytwitterbutler.com?subject=i'm%20being%20Sued> +1-212-203-4357 New York +61-2-9016-5642 (Sydney in-dial). +44-20-3129-6001 (London in-dial).
