Twitter API ToS To Force Routing Clicks To Twitter 92
An anonymous reader writes "Twitter has announced that it will change the way it handles URLs in tweets. This has been widely reported, including the likely consequences for bit.ly. What has not received much attention, and was not in the official blog announcement (but in the Google Twitter developers mailing list instead) is that the Terms of Service for all applications that use the Twitter API will be changed to require that any click on a URL in a tweet be routed through a Twitter gateway, allowing Twitter to see exactly which links are followed and by whom."
Workaround (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm confident that at least some Twitter apps will simply not do this. What's Twitter going to do? Ban the popular apps? How would they even go about this? I fully expect the following interesting behavior by the apps that will end up being used the most by people like us.
1. The faker. It will report semi-random clicks or route garbage through the gateway, but never the user's real clicks.
2. The shirker. It will simply not route anything through the gateway.
3. The hider. It will shirk the gateway, but simultaneously masquerade as some other app that itself plays by the rules.
Twitter really has two options if they want to enforce something like this. They can force ALL apps to play by their rules (breaking functionality for perhaps a large portion of their userbase) or they can accept the fact that people will route around this. I don't see the former happening, in all honesty, and they've engendered little love from third party developers of late, so they can't count on developer goodwill either.
Re:Some good can come from this (Score:4, Interesting)
When a small personal site that I administer got hacked by the Chinese (thanks to a Blogger security hole), Google and Firefox both flagged it as "dangerous" and took appropriate actions to warn people that visiting my site was a huge security risk. For sites that have been compromised by malware, it's absolutely necessary to inform visitors that they're exposing their computers to risk by visiting.
Thus, having an "access blacklist" isn't always a bad thing. Something tells me Twitter isn't about to start censoring sites with information about the Freedom of Tibet or the Genocide in Darfur.
Re:Learnign from the pros... (Score:3, Interesting)
Fark.com has been doing this forever, at least for the main links. I'm quite surprised they haven't done it for inline links, yet.
-l
Web 2.0 is the retardation of computing. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not just twitter, mind you. The whole Web 2.0 movement is built around a dumbing-down of computing, both for the users and the implementers.
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and the other major properties are nothing but a collection of useless data. Even the advertising and datamining uses are of limited or dubious value.
It's hilarious that twitter, for instance, is crumbling under a load that the airline and financial industries could handle back in the 1970s. Instead of using better products, Web 2.0 companies have turned towards dumbing down how they build their infrastructure. That's why we're seeing so much bloody hype about NoSQL.