Samuel Liew’s Blog

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After trying out twidroyd for less than a day, I don’t use it anymore cos the interface sucks. The app got disabled by Twitter today.

Dear Samuel Liew (@samliew),

Regardless of how you access Twitter, we are dedicated to making Twitter better, faster and more reliable for you. As part of this effort, we ask applications that work with Twitter to abide by a simple set of rules that we believe are in the interests of our users, and the health and vitality of the Twitter platform as a whole. We often take actions to enforce these rules.

We are sending this email today because we suspended twidroyd for violating our policies.

Every day, we suspend more than one hundred applications that are in violation of our policies. Generally, these apps are used by a small number of users. We are taking the unusual step of sending out this letter because today’s suspension may affect a larger number of users.

We are committed to helping you continue to use Twitter during the disruption of this application. You can download Twitter for Android and other official Twitter apps here. You can also try our mobile web site or apps from other third-party developers.

We appreciate your continued support of Twitter and regret any inconvenience to you.

Twitter Support Team – @support
support.twitter.com

Update: Download Squad just reported on it:

Users of popular Twitter clients UberTwitter and Twidroyd found that they couldn’t log into Twitter today, and a post in the Twitter help center explains why: UberTwitter and Twidroyd have been suspended for violating Twitter’s policies. TechCrunch followed up with Twitter on the suspensions and discovered that the suspended apps were violating Twitter’s privacy, trademark and monetization rules.

Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner told TechCrunch, “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.”

Both UberTwitter and Twidroyd were recently purchased by UberMedia, a company that has been buying up Twitter clients (Echofon and TweetDeck are other recent purchases) and adding them to its Twitter ad network. The trademark issues probably arose because of the “Twitter” in UberTwitter’s name, but whatever UberMedia did to provoke Twitter’s ire is more likely an issue with paid tweets or tweeting ads on behalf of users. Twitter has made in-stream ad networks a strict no-no under its API terms. It will be interesting to see what specific violation it found in UberMedia’s case, but so far it hasn’t been revealed.

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