Twitter’s announcement disuading developers from creating Twitter Clients prompted me to read the updated terms and conditions – something I should do more often. I also found an old copy from March 1st via Google cache, so I could compare them.
There is indeed a new subsection: 1.5, but it does not explicitly forbid the development of client software. It does however indicate that they will be watching you closely if you choose to do so.
1.5.a: “Your Client must use the Twitter API as the sole source for features that are substantially similar to functionality offered by Twitter”
Somewhat ambiguous, but the important point is they can add clauses to this section whenever they like. Get it?
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* disclaimer: I have no evidence that Charlie Sheen drinks Kool Aid.
It’s no secret that the advertising industry is under pressure to invent new ways of reaching an increasingly savvy and cynical audience. It may be one step ahead of the average consumer – but not us cool Internet kids – we own this place. We trained our eyes not to look at banners, we laughed in the face of FarmVille, and now we’re hiding Groupon from our News Feeds (so last year). We win at Internet.
Sometimes though, I realise I’ve not been quite cynical enough. Like when I found out Cassette Boy was getting paid by ITV. These moments are a little reminder of how the world really works.
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This week I gave a presentation to London’s Twitter Developer Nest (DevNest), and soft-launched a new app that is currently in a prototype stage.
Spoiler alert: The project I demoed is a Web of Trust for community-verified Twitter accounts. The site is called cert.me.uk – it’s invite-only at this very early stage.
You can see my less-than-beautiful slide deck here. As it has no bullet points, there are notes for each slide below.
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I logged onto TwitPic this morning, and was struck by the Twitter-like appearance of their new design.
[ Update: this design very quickly reverted, and has not been re-instated ]
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TwitBlock is over a year old now. One thing we have tried to avoid is being an authority on what is and isn’t spam. We have deliberately avoided blacklisting accounts. The idea has always been to empower the community to collectively decide what is spam by bringing the most likely junk accounts to the surface. We provide some very simple analysis, and indicate how many other people also think an account is spam.
A blacklist is now in effect
For reasons that I’ll explain below, we have decided to implement a blacklist system as of today. Blacklisted Twitter accounts always show up with a 100% confidence score and will appear at the top of scan results. You can still see the standard spam score indicators, as the screen-grab below shows.
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