Australian developer threatened by Twitter over application

An Australian software developer living in New York has been told by Twitter to shut down a third-party Twitter application he created, and give control over the application’s website domain to the company.

Dean Collins, who works at software consultancy firm Cognation, developed the “My Twitter Butler” application that allows users to automatically follow other Twitter users based upon keywords in their posts.

The application also allows users to send “direct message broadcasts” to a number of users at once. It can be purchased for $US10 on the MyTwitterButler.com domain.

But yesterday Collins was contacted by a law firm representing Twitter, which demanded he cease operation of the domain name and submit its ownership to the social networking giant.

Collins says he has contacted Twitter by phone to see what can be arranged, but he has so far not received any reply from the company regarding the matter.

“I actually don’t know what’s behind this,” Collins says. “Is this a change for Twitter and are they going after a whole heap of developers? Who knows. All I know is that I came home from work, saw that PDF letter and that’s all I know.”

Collins says the application developed out of an idea he had with some friends, and began selling it for $US10 on his website, but makes “minimal income”.

Collins defends his actions, and says Twitter should remember the developer community that made the service a success.

“Twitter is wondering how they got big in the first place, but there are a good 3,000 developers out there, making applications like I am, and some people are still doing very well from it. If they don’t want me to do create an application like this, then why are they providing the developer APIs that enable me to do so?”

“So right now I’m waiting for a phone call. They may just want me to change the app name and domain name, in which cause that’s a business just being a business, but…the whole thing depends on the nature of their concern.”

Karen Web, who represents Twitter through law firm Fenwick, sent Collins the letter in which she referred to his alleged “infringement of Twitter’s trademark rights”.

“Twitter has recently become aware that you have registered and are using the
MyTwitterButler.com domain, where you advertise and offer for sale the “My Twitter Butler” software that facilitates aggressive and automatic following to Twitter users. On your website you also claim to have used the same aggressive following techniques. This activity violates Twitter’s TOS and rules.”

“In light of the above, we must demand that you immediately…deactivate the MyTwitterButler.com website…transfer the MyTwitterButler.com domain to Twitter…comply with Twitter’s TOS and rules, which includes stopping your aggressive and automatic following and offering techniques and software for others to aggressively or automatically follow; and…stop all use of the My Twitter Butler name, the TWITTER mark, or any other name, logo, or domain name that includes TWITTER or any confusingly similar term.”

Webb said Collins has until the 24 August to reply, at which time she says Twitter will be “forced to consider suspending your Twitter accounts and take such steps as it deems necessary to protect its intellectual property rights.”

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