Disclaimer: I'm going to assume this really happened, even though it's coming from a slightly suspicious looking Blogspot address, the description itself looks believable.
The surprising thing here is not the obvious injustice or the callousness of the Twitter team. Rather, it's that people think they somehow have a right to use Twitter's services and accounts like they were their property. The same goes for people who build businesses on Facebook and every other monolithic site. I think users need to understand that they are on someone else's turf, and they are subject to whatever the company decides to do. There is no reasonable expectation of fairness, or of free speech for that matter.
That's why building a business on Twitter is foolish. I hear it's done successfully all the time, yet people have to understand this is a very shaky foundation. We're not even Twitter's customers. Advertisers are Twitter's customers. Nobody should be surprised about this, in fact it's a miracle "outrageous" stories don't happen more often.
If you're not willing to state your reasons for assuming that the source is "slightly suspicious looking", then why bother writing it?
As for people somehow thinking they have the right to use Twitter's services like property - this is actively encouraged by Twitter themselves. They have an entire website dedicated to teaching its users how to develop their accounts as official representatives of their organizations/businesses/brands. You can check it out at http://business.twitter.com/.
The main issue here wasn't that the original owner of the @girlgeeks account assumed that they were entitled to ownership of the username. It was that the name was taken away from them without any opportunity to dispute Twitter's intentions, nor were they given any due notice, so that they may inform their followers and communicate alternative plans to keep in contact with them. They were simply cut off.
I thought the reasons for having doubts about the source were obvious, so I didn't write them down. What matters is I came to the conclusion the story was valid, otherwise I would not have commented on it. And even if it had turned out to be fake, the essence of the story is still important and believable.
> As for people somehow thinking they have the right to use Twitter's services like property - this is actively encouraged by Twitter themselves
I know. But that's not reality, that's marketing.
> The main issue here wasn't that the original owner of the @girlgeeks account assumed that they were entitled to ownership of the username. It was that the name was taken away from them without any opportunity to dispute Twitter's intention [...]
In my view, one follows the other. Allow me to clarify: the outrage over Twitter's behavior comes from the (mistaken) perception that Twitter must provide a service to its users and that it has to do so in a fair and balanced fashion. This sense of entitlement, however, does not correspond to reality. In reality, they can do whatever they want.
I don't mean to defend their actions, personally I don't think this is a nice way to treat users, though there may be legal issues that leave them little choice which we know nothing about.
> Those _are_ reasonable expectations.
Companies certainly want you to believe they are in order to gain their users' trust, but that doesn't mean we should forget who is holding the strings.
Testing this argument; I'm not sure I believe it (yet), so please tear it apart:
When we think of traditional marketing, we think of a company selling a service, marketing it to its customers.
When Twitter encourages you to build your brand on their service, is that really marketing to you? You are not Twitter's customer. They provide a free service. The advertisers are Twitter's customers.
Is it fraud to "market" something in a not-entirely-honest manner to someone who is not and will not be your customer? (Seriously, I'm asking.) I'd consider it morally wrong to lie to someone like that, but is it actually fraudulent in the legal sense?
EDIT: Also a related question: when Twitter says "build your brand on Twitter," are they even marketing to you, the Twitter user? Seems like maybe they're telling potential advertisers (remember, their real customers), "hey, we're getting people to build their brands here, that should be valuable to you!"
Is Twitter really "lying to get money" here? They're telling you that you can build your brand on Twitter. And you can. Is it misleading that they don't have a little asterisk that says at the bottom in fine print, "but we may take it away if someone else has a trademark on your brand name"? Yeah, maybe. Is that fraud? Ehhh... I'm not convinced.
>> As for people somehow thinking they have the right to use Twitter's services like property - this is actively encouraged by Twitter themselves
>I know. But that's not reality, that's marketing.
If you offer something in your marketing that is accepted by the person receiving your service then working directly in opposition to implied expectations of that offer strikes me as a breach of [implied] contract, and certainly contrary to trust and honourable action.
I completely agree. Twitter don't owe anything to anyone using their free services. I'm not arguing that Twitter is bound to any laws of decency, or due process. I am just debating that they should be.
The article doesn't just serve as an account of someone who was wrongfully burned by a company who couldn't care less. It serves as a warning for anyone else looking to foster a relationship with their community/fanbase/customers via Twitter.
I can absolutely get behind the sentiment, and I do believe stories like these should be put out there to serve as a reminder about the true nature of the services we all have come to rely on.
> I'm not arguing that Twitter is bound to any laws of decency, or due process. I am just debating that they should be.
This is where I think our opinions diverge. I don't believe it's reasonable or even possible to bind websites like this legally. But even if it was possible, I assert it's a very bad idea. The justice system in any country is extremely fallible and exploitable, and there are too many laws regarding the net already.
Instead, I think we should move back to a web that operates like a federation of services, as opposed to just giving the reins to a select few companies who make a living from selling advertising. Monolithic sites are great incubators for new ideas, such as Twitter and Facebook. But they're a terrible idea both technically and socially for safekeeping the world's data.
I wasn't implying that they should be bound by law to be decent, or use due process. I meant that they should be decent, and they should use due process, regardless.
Sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, they absolutely should be decent and I even think that Twitter et.al. wouldn't have gotten as far as they did if they hadn't demonstrated basic likability and decency in the past. However, even with the best intentions, stuff like this happens. It's just a matter of probability. Now, as a company grows larger, those good intentions disappear as well, essentially being replaced by a group of lawyers, some draconic ToS, and a couple of outsourced employees on minimum wage that get to decide individual users' fates without any possibility of recourse. This looks to me like an inherent problem of the system, the qualities that made up the spirit of a startup often dissolve over time.
Why there shouldn't be a reasonable expectation of fairness, i.e. that twitter (or any free service for that matter) will not hand your nickname to another entity? I believe there indeed is an unwritten rule on the Internet, that the nickname should belong to the first person who registered it... I mean, if he didn't violate the trademark at the time of registering the account. Of course, twitter has the right to do it, but still I don't find it normal.
Starting with the first BBSes continuing right through to this day, rule one of the net is: the admin has absolute power. There is a tradition that site owners should be benevolent dictators, an assumption I believe is reasonable as far as private servers are concerned, but which is simply preposterous when we're talking about a multi-million dollar business where users aren't even the ones paying the bills.
So, yes, the "nickname honor code" is an unwritten rule, well it's more of a guideline, a ...suggestion really. The only true rule is rule one, see above.
My larger point is that people think Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Gmail, etc... are basic infrastructure services, and that they are entitled to use them. They pay their ISP fee and believe that includes a Twitter account and the right to use it. I suspect many can't tell the philosophical and technical difference between generic email and Facebook anymore. This leads to a false sense of entitlement and an unreasonable expectation of being treated fairly.
Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Gmail, etc. whether they charge users a fee or not, all present themselves as basic infrastructure services, with an implied expectation that if you register a name with them, that's as good as having a phone number, and it will not be taken away from you unless the service is discontinued.
Legally speaking, Twitter is probably okay here, but if Facebook or Google did the same thing, I would expect they could be legally liable. Google's TOS for example states:
>We take appropriate security measures to protect against unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of data. These include internal reviews of our data collection, storage and processing practices and security measures, including appropriate encryption and physical security measures to guard against unauthorized access to systems where we store personal data.
It's reasonable to assume that people are using Gmail as a verification email for other services, so they could actually be breaching their own TOS by giving someone's username to someone else, since when you've used a Gmail account for even three months, it becomes personal information that should be protected.
Ethically speaking, all services should be doing due diligence when reassigning usernames. This isn't IRC, all of these services are marketing themselves as identity gateways, and reassigning identities without cause borders on outright fraud. In this case of course, they're actually acting as they normally do, trying to make sure that online identities match legal identities, so it's more understandable, and probably protects them from allegations that they're facilitating fraud. But your authoritarian system is ethically dubious, and furthermore unlikely to hold up in a court of law.
> you seems to take a mental image created in your head by marketing for a contract fine print.
Representations given to a user ("marketing") can constitute an implied contract, or at least a cause of action if they aren't fulfilled. It'd be one thing if Google said up front that their service should be considered unreliable, and may be discontinued at any time, or user accounts even arbitrarily given to third parties. But if they claim otherwise up front, that can be at least somewhat legally binding. Not sure how a court case would turn out, but they aren't automatically in the clear.
Now you are paying for the service and if you stop paying for service it can go to anyone, but that's not the carrier's decision. Telephone numbers are federally regulated.
The Wikipedia article on telephone numbers also suggests that the bureaucracy managing them tries to avoid reassigning disconnected numbers if those numbers are still receiving regular calls. And this makes sense, since people receiving messages intended for someone else is bad for operators, and bad for the users.
As others have noted, there may even be regulations [1] that apply here, though Twitter seems pretty safe from a legal perspective, even if ethically they're in the wrong.
I don't know how to say I don't agree with your first sentence, because I think that the reasonable thing to expect when dealing with issues like this is that unfortunate things are going to happen quite often.
Twitter has how many tens of millions of users? Twitter doesn't need to be an arrogant, corrupt gangster corporation to screw over people many times a day. With the number of complaints they get, I can only imagine the sort of pressure they feel to develop some sort of standardized process for dealing with these issues with an amount of perceived objectivity.
This seems very much like the iOS App Store situation: any system that is designed to make decisions at a sufficient rate (and at a sufficiently low cost) is going to perpetrate injustices. I am quick to flip the bozo bit on people who see dark conspiracies in these sorts of things.
Why is that a reasonable definition of "fair"? I got their "first", so it's mine? That attitude just means that people go around squatting for names.
Seriously: you should have to earn the usage of your name. Before this stupid world where poorly thought-through websites allow people to, for the remainder of all time (or until the company dies), reserve a name, multiple people could use the same name as long as they didn't cause confusion to the populace (at which point it should be expected that the courts become involved, as that is a matter of fraud).
Regardless, if you want to take the definition of "first == fair", GIRLGEEKS had that name in 1999. Everyone is making it sound like "if you don't get a trademark on your name someone else can take it from you", but that totally ignores the fact that they'd have to get a reasonable trademark /before/ you established your name (and conflicts with your use class, which I believe this situation did, and causes confusion, which I can see this situation also doing).
In this case, the thing people should be bothered about is that GIRLGEEKS has a "DEAD" trademark that was cancelled for its use class: they don't have a trademark, and Twitter made a mistake in honoring it.
I don't think so. You want to reference the statute? Domain name conflicts, have to go through a more proper administrative and legal process, for example. Twitter could chose to handle it like a domain name challenge, I believe.
Do you want to reference the statute? Domain name conflicts are not addressed by any legal statute that I know of; it's simply been the policy of the registrars from the start because everybody knew it was going to be a problem. Twitter didn't have that foresight.
The key is this: if this new organization GIRLGEEKS has a trademark, they have a trademark. What's Twitter's motivation to challenge that in court? None whatsoever. If the original @girlgeeks wants to challenge it, she's welcome to do so, but the point is that trademark law does exist, a trademark was granted (even though I think it probably shouldn't have been) and somebody has to foot the bill if it's going to be contested, and as much as I'd like to think it's the person with the money, even I don't think that's Twitter's obligation.
Now, if it were me (and it was, for years, at Despammed.com), I'd say, sorry, that name is taken unless you get a court order, leaving the ball in the court where it should have been to start with. Twitter is obviously more craven than I am, but then I was very small and not concerned with paying a staff.
The point is, if you want rights to a name, just using it on some free service is sadly not enough to get them, and complaining that a large organization is not being fair is no substitute, even if true.
Trademark law does not create a blanket right to use a name in all instances, or to the exclusive right to use a particular string of letters. It creates the right to exclusive use of a mark in a particular "class" of trade so long as you actually use that mark and also show that you have protected it against infringement. (This is also why they're a better system than domain names: it's much harder to "squat" on a trademark.) If the original user of the account was not competing with the organization holding the trademark, not pretending to be them, etc, then the fact they have a trademark is irrelevant.
If you have a consulting company named "thisisourname" and I have a muffin bakery called "thisisourname", we can both have trademarks on that name without any conflict.
I dunno about the statute - you're the one who claimed there was a law requiring Twitter's behavior. You now seem to acknowledge that they DO NOT have to surrender account names merely because someone asserts a trademark claim.
I was pointing out that the domain name process also does not require that a domain owner surrender a domain merely because someone asserts a trademark claim (I can use another's trademark, in cases where I make it clear I am not causing confusion in the market).
I think we are in agreement about a better policy for Twitter; it should let users keep their account names unless required to transfer them via some legal process. I think it would be OK to show some sort of banner on a disputed account's home page, so that visitors are not confused about the true owner - but I don't think it should be just redistributing them.
> I believe there indeed is an unwritten rule on the Internet
key element in your sentence is unwritten.
yes, it's annoying. but no, you have no right when you're sharecropping. and no, and it's not really clear that the @girlgeeks girl has any more right to that name than the @GIRLGEEKS organization. The larger problem here, the elephant in the room perhaps, is the notion of someone "owning" a name or word, combined with the fact that two or more people can simulateously or independently decide they both want to use that name. One party might be the first to create a Twitter account with it. Another party might be the first to create a Facebook page. Another to create a domain name. Another to write song with that title. Another to write a book or story with that title. Another to release a code project with that name. And so on. Inevitably, there will be conflicts. It sucks, but until/unless we have some central globally-unique-and-authoritative Registry of Names For Anything Anywhere with clear written rules, then, this is just going to keep on happening and happening.
Me? Old news. Knew about this flaw prob at least 25 years ago.
[note to self: there's a startup idea and/or political initiative in here somewhere]
The contact info in your profile is a gmail address. If google decides to wipe your account and give that username to someone else, do you think it's wrong?
How's it different?
This is exactly my point. I don't have the expectation that Google is somehow bound to let me use their service. The moment I start using Gmail, I accept that they can close my account at will, spy on my messages, delete all my stuff. In this case, I don't believe that's going to happen, but if they did I would not be fundamentally surprised. I'm using their service because it's convenient. If they stop offering it, or if something happens that ticks me off, I'll move on.
You would be far more surprised if Google took away your username than if Twitter did. That's the point. Twitter should be held to the same standard that we hold Google to on this matter.
Why should they be? Let's say you have a GMail address, and you use it as the verification email for your bank account. If Google takes your GMail address and arbitrarily assigns it to someone else, that creates a big security issue: now this other person can (for example) get a password reset link sent for your bank account to their new email address.
If Twitter reassigns your username to someone else, it sucks for all the reasons described in the blog post, but I find it hard to see potential security issues or the potential for identity theft. Confusion, yes, but hardly anything more serious.
So yes, I would hold Google to a higher standard than I would Twitter.
I suppose also an examination of their respective Terms of Use documents might shed some light on what you can expect and the standards you should hold, as well.
Disclaimer: I'm going to assume this really happened, even though it's coming from a slightly suspicious looking Blogspot address, the description itself looks believable.
The google results for "girlgeeks twitter" are different from the twitter account. (e.g. Twitter lists no personal name, google does. Twitter has no lists, google does) This difference in information supports the idea that the twitter account has recently completely changed.
I'm curious if there's actually stats on blogspot blogs being unreliable or spammy? How does it compare to wordpress blogs, etc? Because unless there's data to back this up, I find this an unreasonable prejudice. I do find some quality blogs out there running on blogspot time to time.
It's not about Blogspot. Come on, the adress is ac31004.blogspot.com for crying out loud and there is very little content actually on the site. Those properties ought to set off some flags in the seasoned web user's brain. In this case, these flags were false positives, and I acknowledged as much in my comments.
The blogspot account has been active since July of 2010 (last year), and has over 26 different postings (an average of more than 2 per month). Most of the articles are about a technology HNers are interested in such as Apache Cassandra.
From this particularly cursory perusal I do not think that it raises any flags.
I do not, as a matter of order, hold a blogs name against it.
I came to the same conclusion, otherwise I wouldn't have written the post at all. However, it's a blog with a spammy looking address and very few articles in it. I didn't mean this to be an attack on the author, it's just a first impression that gave me pause.
The blogger is a University lecturer. The address looks spammy because it's the name of a course module. It's not obvious though, so I thought I'd clear it up.
"Rather, it's that people think they somehow have a right to use Twitter's services and accounts like they were their property."
Users think that the site is granting them this right when they sign up and select a name. I don't see it as "entitled" thinking at all. It seems to be a reasonable assumption, more so for paid services than for Twitter or Facebook.
The surprising thing here is not the obvious injustice or the callousness of the Twitter team. Rather, it's that people think they somehow have a right to use Twitter's services and accounts like they were their property. The same goes for people who build businesses on Facebook and every other monolithic site. I think users need to understand that they are on someone else's turf, and they are subject to whatever the company decides to do. There is no reasonable expectation of fairness, or of free speech for that matter.
That's why building a business on Twitter is foolish. I hear it's done successfully all the time, yet people have to understand this is a very shaky foundation. We're not even Twitter's customers. Advertisers are Twitter's customers. Nobody should be surprised about this, in fact it's a miracle "outrageous" stories don't happen more often.