The Federal Trade Commission is investigating the way Twitter deals with third-party app developers, reports Business Insider. At least one company has been contacted by the FTC through the investigation.
FTC concerns about Twitter stem from action taken by the micro-blogging company in February of this year when two UberMedia apps, UberTwitter and Twidroyd, were banned due to stated “policy violations.”
UberMedia has released a statement to the press, confirming that they had been contacted by the FTC.
“We have been contacted by the FTC and are in the process of responding to their requests,” an UberMedia spokesperson told Business Insider. The representative has so far declined to give further details about the investigation, or what exactly the FTC hoped to learn.
Twitter has so far declined to comment on the matter.
In Spring of 2010, Twitter announced that it planned to begin offering “official” versions of the third-party services that are available. This started with its official Twitter mobile app. Then, in May, the company purchased popular Twitter client TweetDeck for between $30 million and $40 million. The purchase came as a surprise, as previous reports indicated that UberMedia, not Twitter, was in line to purchase TweetDeck.
Twitter’s scramble to regain control of its ecosystem stems from the company’s inability to profit from its popularity. And popular it is: Thursday, Twitter announced on its blog that users are now publishing 200 million tweets per day. That’s up from the 65 million that were posted each day in January of 2009.
“For perspective,” writes Twitter, “every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of War and Peace would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world.”
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