This is a terrible idea. 1. It's unethical because Twitter users have never authorized Twitter to use their email addresses in this way. The TOS specifically states "We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours." My profile is mine; that includes my email address.
2. It will drive users away from Twitter because they will start getting email that says "Hey, we know you use Twitter! Your account name is @DWRoelands! Follow us on Twitter!" Users don't like having their email addresses used in ways that surprise them; ESPECIALLY when it results in marketing email that they didn't ask for. Many users will conclude (incorrectly) that Twitter sold their email addresses and that's not the sort of press Twitter needs. 3. It's a spammer's dream; an email-validation system that not only tells you which email addresses are probably good - it also gives you a pile of Twitter usernames to auto-spam-follow. As a developer and a user, I hope Twitter -never- implements this. On Aug 19, 8:12 pm, Jesse Stay <[email protected]> wrote: > Here's the use-case we should be considering for this, and I think it's > valid and I'd love to see Twitter allow this: > With the ability to identify matching Twitter users by e-mail, you can now > suggest to your users people in their friends list on your own website that > have Twitter accounts and allow them to follow on Twitter as well as your > own site. Or vice-versa - if your users are friends on Twitter but not on > your site, you can identify this and suggest they become friends on your own > site. Facebook allows this by enabling developers to send a hash digest of > the user's e-mail address (or group of users e-mail addresses) on your > system, and Facebook returns a list of users on Facebook that match those > e-mail addresses (with some caveats). No e-mail address is ever revealed and > you can match by e-mail that way. > > I think this would be a very useful feature, especially from a marketing > perspective, but from the Ux perspective as well, for Twitter to implement. > > Jesse > > > > On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 9:07 AM, arawajy <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Dear Developers, > > I have a list of 400,000 e-mail addresses of my clients. I want to > > know "Is it possible to develop a script to check if they have a > > twitter account or not?". I will then want to generate 2 separate > > lists based upon the result; one for the twitter users and one for the > > non-twitter users. I want to only invite the users and create a custom > > invitation message. Is it possible to check if the e-mail address's > > owner is a twitter user or not? provide details please. > > Thanks and Regards, > > Mahmoud
