Twitter Solidifies Governance: New Terms Keep Out Bots
Although we're not sure they actually understand governance statements, we know they can scrape them. In the past year Twitter has noticed an influx in bots and to curb it, the company is strengthening its policies. In a recent blog post by co-founder Biz Stone, the company announced amendment of its Terms of Service. ReadWriteWeb recently covered Facebook's widely-criticized TOS proceedings. As a stark improvement, Twitter is offering users an archived copy of its past TOS as well as a link to its Twitter support portal for feedback.
Stone outlined a number of changes to the Terms of Service including advertising stipulations, ownership and usage agreements, API usage and a clear mechanism for dealing with spam. While many of the points are reiterations of pre-existing policies such as the "right to remove content" and "reclaim user names", a number of points have been added to protect against malware and bots. As Twitter's API and site feeds can be used by a variety of 3rd party developers, it's only natural that a service with this sort of popularity would attract it's share of bottom feeders. Statements around storage limits, mail-bombing, viruses and scripting are meant to protect against disruptive marketing and site saboteurs. For the complete TOS visit twitter.com/tos.
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Can only hope Twitter gets the balls it needs to rid its otherwise wonderful playground from all of the auto crap and spam peddlers. I"m hopeful, but skeptical. I've migrated my activity to Facebook lately, finding I get more traction and satisfaction from 450 FB connections than 4900 on Twitter. It's the quality of connections, certainly not the quantity. Lots of noise on Twitter, and cutting through it is getting more difficult each day.