Too bad Twitter didn't originally register "Twitter.org" as well. It would have saved the company from the headache of trying to gain control of the domain, which is now being used to conduct scam surveys of people who unwittingly arrive thinking they're at Twitter.com. The Twitter.org site is set up to intentionally create confusion and make it appear that the actual Twitter is conducting a survey and giving away prizes. The look and feel of the landing page replicates Twitter's earlier design and branding. Fusible.com first reported this story. Twitter has filed a complaint with the Wo [...]

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This is a coup for Twitter: The company is partnering with Nielsen to become the first arbiter of the most socially successful U.S. TV programs. The companies have a new multi-year agreement to create the "Nielsen Twitter TV Rating," a measurement that Nielsen says will serve as a complement to its existing TV ratings. While the latter measures "first screen" viewership (i.e., on the television), the new Twitter TV Rating will serve as an industry-standard metric for "second screen" activity -- i.e., the reach of conversation on Twitter about TV programs. I called it a "coup" for Twitter [...]

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You'll be excused if you think the social media platform battles are starting to look like something you'd see on Romper Room. The latest step in this back-and-forth is Instagram's decision to prevent its images from showing properly on Twitter's website and clients. At the LeWeb conference today, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom confirmed the move and said that his company plans to fully prevent Instagram images from being embedded on Twitter. Here's how he's quoted on the New York Times' Bits blog: We've decided that right now, what makes sense, is to direct our users to the Instagram Web [...]

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PeopleBrowsr, the social analytics platform that derives substantially all its data (including its Kred scoring) from access to Twitter's feed, has fallen victim to Twitter's recent ambitions to rein in and exercise more control over its ecosystem. The company, which once promised an open platform and developer access to its data "firehose," has more recently tightened the rules surrounding use of its API. PeopleBrowsr's business is fundamentally threatened by these changes. And so it sought (and obtained) a temporary restraining order (TRO) preventing Twitter from cutting off its direct ac [...]

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Tweetro, a popular free Twitter client for Windows 8, is shutting down its free version and will work on a paid version -- the latest episode of Twitter's recent API changes impacting its developer community. Tweetro recently ran up against Twitter's 100,000 user token limit and temporarily pulled its app from the Windows Store pending further clarification from Twitter. As WindowsObserver.com reports today, Twitter's clarification came with bad news from Lazyworm, the makers of Tweetro: "Thank you for reaching out to get clarification on our developer policies. As you know, we discou [...]

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Google, Facebook, Twitter and even Starbucks are being criticized and investigated for what several European governments consider to be tax avoidance. In the UK and France in particular Google is under scrutiny. And earlier this week a French newspaper (albeit like the satirical Onion) reported that French authorities had served a whopping EUR 1 billion tax bill on Google. Google has denied that it has received such a bill. Google's practice of billing advertisers and running profits through its Irish subsidiary, which is legal, allows the company to minimize taxes. According to a Reuter [...]

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Would you pay $20 for a Twitter client? Especially when Twitter has its own free client, and several other Twitter clients are also free? That's the question that Tapbots is asking Twitter users. The company, makers of the excellent and popular (and free) Tweetbot client for iOS, has just released its desktop Mac version of Tweetbot ... and it comes with a $19.99 price tag in the Mac App Store. Why? In its announcement today, Tapbots says $20 is "not that expensive" for a piece of software that might get used every day. But the price isn't just a reflection of development time and cos [...]

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The first U.S. Presidential debate on Wednesday night led to yet another -- and completely unsurprising -- record for Twitter activity. The Twitter communications team spread the news shortly after the debate ended, saying that the debate topped activity during both the Republican and Democratic National Convention and was "the most tweeted about event in US political history." That last bit is pretty cheeky. US political history? Since Twitter's only been around for six years, I'd say that different wording was in order, but I wouldn't go so far as to throw the whole idea of tweet miles [...]

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Update: Due to new information, the original headline of this story has been changed. Please see the postscript at the end of the original article. If This Then That (IFTTT) is notifying users today that it will stop supporting Twitter-based "triggers" as of next Thursday, September 27th. But the service will still allow users to create actions that use Twitter as the "action" -- the end result of a trigger. In a letter to users, IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets says Twitter's new developer guidelines mean that IFTTT users can no longer use the service to send tweets to Dropbox, Evernote, email [...]

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Twitter debuted a shiny new user profile page today and simultaneously launched new versions of its official iOS and Android apps. Much was made of the changes, but lost in the PR blitz is this: Any Twitter user that posts photos to the service from now on will be doing it via Twitter's own photo service, not via one of the many third-party providers such as yFrog, Mobypicture or Twitpic. The option to choose a photo service is now missing in the settings on Twitter's mobile apps. Users can still choose a video hosting service (for how long, one has to wonder) and a read later service, [...]

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If you're one of those third-party image services that works with Twitter, it might be time to start thinking about a pivot. Having already circled its API wagons to the detriment of LinkedIn users, Instagram users, and angering many with its new developer ecosystem vision, Twitter appears set to drop the hammer next on companies like TwitPic, yFrog and other image services. According to BuzzFeed, Twitter is about to drop support for third-party image services from its official apps -- perhaps in the next round of app updates. Noah Everett, founder of TwitPic, tells BuzzFeed that Tw [...]

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Three weeks after announcing its plans for a new API and associated developer rules, Twitter today formally released API 1.1 to developers. Along with the new API, Twitter has also updated the API Terms (what Twitter calls its "Rules of the Road") and display requirements. In his blog post, Twitter's Jason Costa went out of his way to clarify one of the developer community's biggest complaints about the more restrictive API -- the 100,000 user token limit. Costa says that will only apply to certain apps: The 100,000 user token limit applies only to the small set of clients replicati [...]

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The dust is still settling on yesterday's news that Twitter is prepping a new API for release in the near future. And while many developers immediately slammed Twitter's new rules, not everyone is angry about the changes. Aaron Gotwalt, who co-founded the now-defunct CoTweet, said on Twitter this morning that he thinks the new API rules are friendly toward developers. As a guy who built a successful startup on the Twitter platform, I'm pleasantly surprised at how developer-friendly the 1.1 rules are. — Aaron Gotwalt (@gotwalt) August 17, 2012   If you're not familiar with it, [...]

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Twitter announced new rules for accessing its data today and how those are designed to encourage certain types of products and services while discouraging others. It even published a "quadrant" chart to explain all this. The world of Star Trek has quadrants, too. I thought it would be fun and perhaps useful to blend the two for those who may be confused about what Twitter did today. Safety In The Alpha Quadrant [caption id="attachment_19112" align="alignright" width="192" caption="Captain Kirk, from StarTrek.com"][/caption] In Star Trek, the Alpha Quadrant is home to several core Federati [...]

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Twitter developers may not like some of the details, but they finally have more clarity about Twitter's plans for its API and how it expects the overall developer ecosystem to look and operate in the future. About six weeks after it warned developers that "stricter guidelines" were coming, Twitter announced the new rules today. They'll take effect "in the coming weeks" when Twitter releases version 1.1 of its API. Developers will have six months to migrate to the new API and fall in line with the new rules. Those new rules include: Required authentication: Applications won't be able t [...]

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Some in the marketing and developer communities are buzzing with the weekend's news that App.net, a potential Twitter competitor, raised more than $500,000 in funding -- not from venture capitalists, but from its new users. With about 12 hours left in its fund raising window, App.net currently says it's raised $734,850 from 11,205 supporters. App.net is the brainchild of Dalton Caldwell, who founded the now-defunct social/music site imeem in 2003. Caldwell most recently made headlines for a Dear Mark Zuckerberg letter in which he wrote about the frustrations of dealing with Facebook's me [...]

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Twitter has confirmed that one of its departments helped NBC report the account of journalist Guy Adams to another of Twitter's departments as violating Twitter's privacy rules, getting the account temporarily suspended. Twitter's apologized for that interaction. The Apology In a blog post today, Twitter's general counsel Alex Macgillivray wrote: We want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up. The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support [...]

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Yesterday, journalist Guy Adams, who writes for The Independent, found his Twitter account had been suspended. The reason? Twitter claimed he tweeted the email of an NBC executive in charge of that network's Olympics coverage in a way that violated Twitter's rules on privacy. But why suspend Adams and not so many others, including celebrities, who have done the same thing? Adams is back on Twitter now, saying that Twitter emailed him that NBC retracted its original complaint. This follows on news today that Twitter itself may have tipped NBC to the tweet and suggested a way that it co [...]

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Instagram, the social photo-sharing site that Facebook bought earlier this year for about $1 billion, says that it's now crossed the 80-million-user level. That user base has also shared nearly four billion photos, the company says. But those users will find a slightly less functional mobile app when they upgrade to the latest version. As TechCrunch is reporting, the "Find Friends" tool no longer supports Twitter. A user clicking the button to find friends via Twitter gets a pop-up message that, according to TechCrunch's screenshot, says: Unable to Find Friends Twitter no longer al [...]

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Twitter and NBC have announced a new partnership around the 2012 Summer Olympics, which begin this week in London. The partnership centers on Twitter's third "hashtag page," which will go live later this week at twitter.com/#Olympics. Twitter will have staff monitoring Olympic-related tweets from athletes, coaches, Olympics officials, NBC personalities and others and curating the best content surrounding the #Olympics hashtag on a single page. NBC will promote the page and the hashtag during its on-air coverage across each of the networks that is providing coverage, including in primeti [...]

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