Twitter blocks Twidroyd over policy violations
Twidroyd and two other mobile device clients — UberTwitter and UberCurrent — have been temporarily suspended by microblogging service Twitter for violations of its policies.
The services, all run by entrepreneur Bill Gross's Twitter-focused company UberMedia, were blocked on on Friday. The clients allow people to access the blogging service on a variety of platforms, such as BlackBerrys and Android and iOS-based devices.
"Today we suspended several applications, including UberTwitter, Twidroyd and UberCurrent, which have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways," Matt Graves, Twitter's communications director, wrote on online question-and-answer service Quora on Friday.
"These violations include, but aren't limited to, a privacy issue with private direct messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users' tweets in order to make money," he continued.
Twitter has been in discussion with UberMedia about policy violations for its applications since April 2010, according to Graves.
In a separate Quora posting on Friday, Gross said Twitter had taken issue with UberMedia's use of tweet-elongation service 'tmi.me'. According to Twitter, the service exposed users to the risk of seeing private messages posted publicly, he said.
In addition, Twitter said that it wanted the name of UberTwitter altered and that it believed links in UberCurrent tweets were being changed as part of an UberMedia-benefiting affiliate program, Gross said. "We don't currently do this, but we removed all changing of links to eliminate any possibility of this," he wrote.
He also said UberMedia will change the name of UberTwitter to UberSocial, "effective immediately".
"Twitter... said that as soon as [UberMedia] made these changes, they would restore our access to their API. All the changes have been made, and Twitter has been notified, and we are waiting for the apps to be restored,” he wrote.
UberMedia is reportedly in the process of acquiring London-based Twitter client provider TweetDeck. TweetDeck has a tweet elongation service named Deck.ly.