ReadWriteWeb

There is a lot to be learned from our tweets. Laugh if you will. Go ahead. But Twitter has become an important historical and cultural record. It's a site for real-time news and information, to be sure. The stuff of history with a capital H. Politics. Natural disasters. Revolution. It's a site that records our cultural history as well (is that history with a lower case H?). Ashton Kutcher. Charlie Sheen. The Oscars. Lower case or capital H - these 140 character exchanges have created an invaluable record for researchers looking at history, politics, literature, sociology.

Such was the argument that Twitter made when the startup donated its archives to the Library of Congress. Tweets are important. They should be preserved, archived and accessible to scholars.

But Twitter's recent announcement that it was no longer granting whitelisting requests and that it would no longer allow redistribution of content will have huge consequences on scholars' ability to conduct their research, as they will no longer have the ability to collect or export datasets for analysis.

Parents who use anti-bullying and anti-sexting software to monitor their children's online activities may be giving up family privacy and increasing their personal liability, according to the group School Safety Partners. The group, which aims to help support best practices for online safety, says that parents may be unaware of the ways in which the Terms of Service of child monitoring software companies dictate how personal information that's monitored is used.

Ah, Terms of Service - the legally-binding document we never read before clicking "accept." So when Agence France-Presse argued this fall that Twitter's ToS granted it free access to photos shared on the microblogging service, there was a veritable shitstorm of people saying, "Wait, what did I agree to?"

Well, rest easy. A U.S. District Court has decided that the AFP (and anyone else for that matter) does not have open rights to content you post to Twitter or photos to you post to Twitpic.

When Twitter COO, Dick Costolo announced on Monday that they were making some changes to their terms of service for developers, prohibiting third-party networks from advertising in users' streams, many in the tech industry initially reacted by saying that the move would spell the end of a number of startups who were providing exactly that service.

Twitter claims it made this move in order to preserve the quality of the user experience on the platform. But how does this announcement impact others working in the Twitter ecosystem?

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.

For Web users who pay little attention to a site's terms of service (TOS) policies when they sign up for a service, or even realize that they constantly change, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has your back. The San Francisco based non-profit advocacy and legal organization announced that it is launching TOSBack, a terms of service tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, and other major websites "to help consumers monitor terms of service for the websites they use everyday, and show how the terms change over time".

Not even two months ago, social news web site Digg.com cleaned house and banned over 80 users for running scripts while on site, including those from Greasemonkey. Digg also banned others for allegedly promoting sites promoting products and services. Now we're getting word that the recommendation engine StumbleUpon may have started a "witchhunt" of their own, banning users of their service for stumbling upon the wrong things. What's worse is that they don't even seem to be responding to emails from the banned users who wanted to know why this happened.