Skip to main content

Twitter suspends Twitdroyd and UberTwitter apps

twitter-twitdroyd-ubertwitter-supendedTwitter is experiencing some growing pains. Last week, CEO Dick Costolo spoke at the Mobile World Congress about how dedicated Twitter is to unifying the tweeting experience across all devices. Today, Twitter has begun to fight apps that don’t follow its policies. The social network has suspended three of its major third party apps–Twitdroyd, UberCurrent, and UberTwitter–for violating its use policies. The charge: failing to keep private messages private, exceeding 140 char length limit, violating trademark, and making money off tweets in suspicious ways.

“Today we suspended several applications, including UberTwitter, twidroyd and UberCurrent, which have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways,” spokespersons for Twitter, have told multiple Websites via email. “These violations include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.

UberMedia

UberMedia, a company that has recently been in talks to purchase TweetDeck, owns the three apps. Speaking directly about UberMedia, spokesperson Matt Graves told PC Mag that action had to be taken.

“We’ve had conversations with UberMedia, the developer of these applications, about policy violations since April 2010, when they first launched under the name TweetUp – a term commonly used by Twitter users and a trademark violation,” said Graves.”We continue to be in contact with UberMedia and hope that they will bring the suspended applications into compliance with our policies soon.”

In an interview with TechCrunch, UberMedia CEO Bill Gross said the company plans to fix its apps: “We just talked to Twitter and discussed the various issues they raise. It took us by surprise because they didn’t raise them before. We started making the changes.” The CEO claims that UberMedia’s apps will soon be in compliance and is changing the name of its client from UberTwitter to UberSocial, effective immediately.

UberMedia is in talks to acquire TweetDeck, one of the most popular Twitter clients.

Use our App instead

Twitter also  responded to users reporting issues with the three apps on its support site, pointing them toward its own apps for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry.

In its early days, Twitter has been one of the most supportive platforms for third party applications and clients. However, in the last year, the social network has finally begun to update and expand its own range of services. Now, many of the services that helped it become large are quickly becoming rivals to its own internal efforts to broaden Twitter’s appeal.

Update: Bill Gross has clarified some of the reasons Twitter suspended UberMedia’s apps on Quora.

Editors' Recommendations

Jeffrey Van Camp
Former Digital Trends Contributor
As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…
I put the RTX 4060 Ti up against the RX 6700 XT — and there’s a surprising winner
RX 6700 XT graphics card installed in computer.

You generally expect that a new generation of graphics cards will outperform the previous generation, but we're in a precarious spot this time around. Nvidia's recent RTX 4060 Ti hasn't been met with a warm reception, and cheaper last-gen options like the RX 6700 XT have looked increasingly attractive as their prices come down.

I threw both cards on my test bench to see which is the better one to buy, and there's a clear winner. There are some important considerations to keep in mind before picking up either GPU, though.
Where's the value?

Read more
These ingenious ideas could help make AI a little less evil
profile of head on computer chip artificial intelligence

Right now, there’s plenty of hand-wringing over the damage artificial intelligence (AI) can do. To offset that, Firefox maker Mozilla set out to encourage more accountable use of AI with its Responsible AI Challenge, and the recently announced winners of the contest show that the AI-infused future doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom.

The first prize of $50,000 went to Sanative AI, which “provides anti-AI watermarks to protect images and artwork from being used as training data” for the kind of large-language models that power AI tools like ChatGPT. There has been much consternation from photographers and artists over their work being used to train AI without permission, something Sanative AI could help to remedy.

Read more
Off to college? Acer just slashed the price of this Chromebook to $200
The Acer Chromebook 314 at a side angle.

Chromebook deals are a special bunch of great value options a lot of the time. We've spotted a particularly great one over at Acer. Right now, you can buy the Acer Chromebook 314 for $200 saving you $100 off the regular price of $300. Even better, if you use the code GRADS10 at checkout, you save an extra 10% so the Chromebook cost just $180. If previous laptop deals have been too pricey for you, this could be the one you've been waiting for. It has all the essentials you need from a Chromebook and even sports a full HD screen. Here's what else you need to know about it.

Why you should buy the Acer Chromebook 314
Acer is one of the best laptop brands for affordable computing, thanks to it knowing how to get the most from a tight budget. The Acer Chromebook 314 has all you could need in this price range. It offers an Intel Celeron N4020 processor along with 4GB of memory and 64GB of eMMC storage. If this system were running Windows 11, it'd be very sluggish but when running Chrome OS, it performs well.

Read more