Feds Knock Knock Knocking On Twitter’s Door

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A report from Business Insider revealed today stating that Twitter, is under active investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC are investigating the way Twitter deals with the companies that build apps and services for them.

Now Twitter has been expanding pretty aggressively as late. First by announcing its plans to make all third party Twitter clients uniform with the functionality of its own and how it plans to add official services to its own client. Services that were normally, only provided by these third party clients, such as photo-sharing and ads. Then, by buying up the competition. And when businessman, entrepreneur and Mr. UberMedia himself, Bill Gross, started buying up Twitter apps and created TweetUp(which, at first was just going to be a Twitter ad network), and then set his sights(and funding from Accel) on popular twitter client TweetDeck, Twitter got really aggressive.

Thinking(or fearing), that Bill Gross would combine all of his clients to create a Twitter competitor, shut down  UberSocial’s (then known as UberTwitter)and Twidroyd’s access to Twitter for a few days, saying that the two popular twitter clients violated Twitter’s terms of use. Then Twitter swooped in and acquired TweetDeck, a pre-emptive move in Twitter’s eyes to stopping a potential competitor. Twitter has also blocked access to, in their own words, “hundreds of third party Twitter clients” for seemingly “violating Twitter’s terms of use”. Twitter has also, earlier this year, stated that Twitter developers should focus on other aspects like “social gaming”, to differentiate itself from Twitter, hinting that those third party clients that are too much like Twitter, may be shut down.  All of this got the attention of the FTC, hence the investigation.

Both Twitter and the FTC have reportedly declined to comment. UberMedia has stated that it “is in the process of responding to FTC requests”. Hip Hop Democrat will keep you all posted on these events.

About The Author

Kamil M Abdullah has been a self proclaimed techie and bonafide smart phone expert nearly half of his life. Starting with the very first Sidekick(not necessarily a smart phone but close enough) to Blackberry to Symbian to Windows(Mobile & Phone 7) to Web OS to Android, he has used virtually every smart phone operating system. Kamil has also worked with computer programming in Bloomberg's Data Center and Backup Operations on their proprietary software. In his quest for further knowledge in mobile operating systems, Kamil voraciously devours any reading material on the subject he can find. Kamil is also a hip hop head to the fullest, having fallen in love with the art form from the very first "a hip hop the hibby to the hibby the hip hip the hop" and tr808 beat. He promises to use his vast powers and knowledge only for the good of mankind.