

Twitter shuts down Fame for unspecified ToS violation - acak
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/12/2944982/twitter-shuts-down-fame-tos-violation

======
apike
The Twitter documentation forbids mass following and mass unfollowing. Spam of
course is the main reason for this - not just blatant spam but people who
follow hundreds of accounts to generate "is now following you" emails, and
periodically purge people who didn't follow back. Still, Fame is entirely opt-
in so it's not really clear to me what they didn't like about it.

Two guesses:

1\. it triggered or messed with automatic spam prevention heuristics.

2\. it's all fun and games until Fame tries to monetize the mass following,
and they wanted preempt that.

------
witten
"This is one of the great tensions of the web era we are living in and
increasingly so as the open web grows. We actually don't violate any
particular rule, it was simply an arbitrary decision that we aren't aligned
with the spirit of what they want."

I found this quote interesting, particular the phrase "open web". A single
site like Twitter, which can arbitrarily shut down accounts based on alleged
TOS violations, seems very distinct from a truly open, federated web.

~~~
chimeracoder
> a truly open, federated web.

Keep in mind, we're talking about a _single_ website (among many) with a
_proprietary_ , non-open, non-free codebase, so the contrast shouldn't be
surprising.

If we were talking about a similar-but-open-source service like Identi.ca,
this would play out _very_ differently.

------
shasta
What's the difference between this and a real person retweeting what the
winner says?

~~~
spullara
Nothing. I suggested in a comment on the first story about @fame that they
ought to just retweet whatever the winner tweets for a day. It is the same
thing but better for all.

------
j_s
"Twitter has informed us that we are violating the spirit of their TOS."

"We actually don't violate any particular rule, it was simply an arbitrary
decision that we aren't aligned with the spirit of what they want."

Keep it classy!

