
Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications - aj
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/01/twitter-grows-uncomfortable-with-the-use-of-the-word-tweet-in-applications/
======
plaggypig
This is ridiculous. On Nov 21st 2008 a representative from Twitter said this,

"There are certainly many applications out there that include Twitter as part
of their name, but we prefer that you not do so. Twit, Tweet etc. are all
fine."

[http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:SGqicWFJttIJ:groups.goog...](http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:SGqicWFJttIJ:groups.google.com/group/twitter-
development-
talk/browse_thread/thread/af57f92d0b6f4283+twitter+trademark+infringement&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

Many people, myself included, acted upon this information in good faith (and
in my case at a monetary cost for a domain name containing the word "tweet").

Does this public pronouncement affect their legal standing when it comes to
defending the trademark "tweet"?

Edit: Should I continue with this?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677643>

~~~
varaon
It seems that they have the same problem the App Store has now - mixed
messages as to what is acceptable, and no clear public guidelines.

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elecengin
Since they now have a trademark application in the works, they _must_ try to
enforce it. When a company consistently neglects to enforce it's trademark and
it becomes part of the language, it becomes a genericized trademark. it ends
up in the same boat as "kleenex" and "xerox" and may not be enforceable in the
future - a.k.a "genericide".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark>

------
ojbyrne
I propose (well, actually Stephen Colbert proposed it) that Twat be the new
Tweet.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I liked Merlin Mann's suggestion of "toot".

Furthermore, my friends and I have started referring to direct messages as
"queefs".

------
pavel_lishin
I know it's unlikely that anyone here will miss this, but note
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682896> \- the website Twitter was
concerned about was TweetKnot, which looks pretty much exactly like a Twitter
knock-off, down to the graphics.

------
Tichy
OK, contest time. Let's find the future word for microblogged statements.

Is there a way to run such a contest in such a way that every suggested word
is automatically free for all to use forever (unless it was trademarked
before)? I almost fear no :-(

On the other hand when I tried to trademark a word in Germany, it was rejected
because it was deemed too common (I didn't think so, but whatever). So maybe
if one could make a case that, say, the word "mext" was already a common name
for microblogging statements, nobody could trademark it for that anymore? Just
when is it common enough - winning a competition would probably be
insufficient?

~~~
gojomo
A short, genericized name for the category is a good idea.

The existing descriptions -- 'status updates', 'activity streams',
'microblogging' -- are awkward for casual/verbed usage.

Possible veins of meaning to mine include:

* similarity to instant-messaging, but more public -- Public Instant Messaging, or PIMming. "I pimmed it." "Check out my pims on Facebook, Twitter, or Laconi.ca."

* similarity to loud-talking -- "shouting". (Could be a prefix letter to IM, as above, to "SIMming" or "SHIMing", or given an e-prefix like e-mail, "e-shouting".)

* conversely, similarity to talking to oneself -- "mumbling", mumble-IM ("mimming", "mimbling"), e-mumbling. (It's interesting that the activity is like both shouting and mumbling in different ways.)

* similarity to 'texting' (as I think your 'mext' example alludes to) -- public-texting ("pexting"), loud-texting ("lexting"), txt-blogging ("togging" or "tlogging"), blog-texting ("blexxing").

------
Semiapies
I _use_ Twitter, but I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with it.

There's no revenue stream for Twitter, except for hitting up investors. Those
investors expect a return. What is Twitter going to do to try to pay them
back? Targeted ads (cool)? Detailed user demographics (not cool)?

Why try to kick the feet out from under the people actually building an
ecosystem around their product? I can understand trying to keep a clear
separation between Twitter and that ecosystem for branding purposes, but I
think this goes beyond that need.

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lp456
Does anyone actually believe they will be pursuing companies using tweet or
twit in URLs?

~~~
shabda
Yes. Consider this hypothetical scenario.

Twitter builds image sharing as part of twitter.com at say twity.com. But
twitpic.com is beating them all the way(better implementation, user inertia
whatever).

Is it hard to see someone at twitter, try to use their trademark to beat them?

[Edit]

Also in their response Twitter says,

> As part of this support, we encourage developers of new applications and
> services built using Twitter APIs to invent original branding for their
> projects rather than use our marks, logos, or look and feel.

And says _nothing_ on whether using tweet in names is acceptable by them. If
they don't mind, wgy not say so?

~~~
jonursenbach
I honestly cannot see Twitter "building" anything new outside of their current
feature set. If they are going to add a native image service, they're going to
buy one of the current popular services (twitpic, yfrog, etc.) and integrate
that.

Come on, they had to buy a search company to give people the ability to search
their index, so the precedent is certainly there.

------
MoeDrippins
I was uncomfortable with it when twitter first came out just due to the sheer
ridiculousosity of it.

------
nanijoe
You can't trademark a word that's in the English dictionary can you?

~~~
callahad
<http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html>

Some amusing entries:

Aperture, Apple, Aqua, Bonjour, Boot Camp, Capitals, Carbon, Charcoal,
Chicago, Cocoa, Exposé, Gadget, Inkwell, Instruments, Keychain, Keynote,
Leopard, Logic, New York, Numbers, Pages, Panther, Photo Booth, Quartz,
Rosetta, Safari, Sand, Shake, Shuffle, Soundtrack, Spaces, Spotlight, Techno,
Textile, Tiger, Time Capsule, Time Machine, Tremor, Tubes.

This is okay because trademarks have namespaces. It's just that namespace
collisions result in lawsuits.

~~~
wallflower
Let's not forget Windows

"If Microsoft loses the trademark battle, it will have a much more difficult
time fending off imitators that promote their products with variations of the
same name. Company officials say customers would be in danger of buying
inferior products and that rivals would effectively get a free ride at
Microsoft's expense."

[http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/25/business/microsoft-
tradema...](http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/25/business/microsoft-trademark-
setback.html)

