Twitter Shuts Down StatTweets

from the so-much-for-being-open... dept

You just knew this would happen. A week after we wrote about how Twitter's openness towards third party developers helped build up its reputation and the willingness of developers to work with it, a story comes out contradicting the main point of the original story. Via Techmeme, we learn that Twitter shut down a service called StatTweets from a company called StatSteet, that provided stats on various sports teams. Since then, Twitter has apparently been quite unresponsive to the developer in his attempts to resolve the issue. Twitter did outline three causes for killing his accounts, though none seem particularly convincing.

There's a copyright claim on the logos, though you could make a pretty strong argument that the use of the logos is legit (there may be some extenuating circumstances, but it doesn't sound like any sports teams complained -- and the guy says he's willing to change the logos if that's the problem). Second, was a complaint about "mass creation" of new accounts. This is obviously to stop spammers. But it's quite clear that StatTweets isn't a spam system, so a quick review should have knocked out that reason. The final reason is if you're accused of "squatting" on a username, but it sounds like the usernames were unique and weren't just the name of various sports teams.

While there's a decent chance that this is an honest mistake on the part of Twitter, it's a sign of some of the growing pains facing the company. I know I've been trying to reach the company about something for the past few weeks and have found it impossible to get any response whatsoever. It's no surprise that employees at the company are busy, given all the attention Twitter has received lately, but the company risked user mutiny a year ago when it had trouble responding to downtime complaints. If it also starts having customer service issues, it again may present an opportunity for people to go elsewhere.

Filed Under: responsiveness, shut downs, stattweets
Companies: statsheets, twitter