Today, Twitter's Biz Stone posted Twitter's news Terms of Service, a document as elegant and concise in its simplicity as Twitter itself.
Notable is the answer to the question of who owns your Tweets: you. Twitter reserves the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" anything you Tweet, all while clarifying that your content is your content.
As before, Twitter prohibits impersonating others (what? I can't say I'm really Britney Spears?), copyright infringement and illegal activity. New is the definition and steps the microblogging service is taking to reduce spam, including the creation of serial accounts "for disruptive or abusive purposes," name squatting and selling user names. The definition of spam and spam-indicating activities is a clear list, including:
- If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
- If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
- If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile
For these, I give Twitter a hearty round of applause. Last week, I sat on a panel where a PR professional recommended getting followers by doing the above. She said, in public, that the way to develop a following on Twitter was to follow the limit of 2,000 users a day, wait a few days, then unfollow all those who didn't follow you back.
Thank you, Twitter, for shutting down this type of menace. Those of us who want to engage in real conversations applaud your efforts to decrease the spam and give us the space to have our dialogue.
