Hi all, Over the past 24 hours, we've received some questions about the Twifficiency app, so we thought we'd use this as an opportunity to quickly share some information around our Developer Principles.
For background, the Twifficiency app computes a "Twifficiency score" based on different aspects of your Twitter account and posts the score as a Tweet. While the developer included a disclaimer that these Tweets would be posted to Twitter, user feedback indicated that the text was too far down on the page to be noticed before proceeding. As a result, many users were surprised that their scores were being tweeted automatically. Which brings us to our Developer Principles, one of which is "Don't surprise users." Specifically, we require developers to get users' permission before sending Tweets or other messages on their behalf. Allowing an application to access your account does not constitute consent for actions to automatically be taken on your behalf. Twifficiency violated this principle, so we suspended the app yesterday afternoon while we worked with the developer to make sure users were better informed about the application's actions and could control whether or not a Tweet would be posted. With these changes --which include a more prominent warning and a checkbox on the main page-- the application has been re-enabled. Our developer principles can be found in our API Terms of Service: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms Brian Sutorius API Policy
