Twitter Claims Ownership of ‘Retweet’, A New Debacle In The Making?
Together with the announcement of the Retweet implementation on Twitter it seems that Twitter has started to send out Cease & Desist orders to third party developers in a try to protect its trademarks. In a weird spin of things, Mesiahlabs, developer of Retweet.com which we discussed previously, has become the victim of this because Twitter has received approval for the term tweet. Mesiab Labs’ @retweet account has effectively been suspended by Twitter. Previously the company had announced that they had no plans to ‘go after’ companies using the term ‘Tweet’.
It rests to be seen if Mesiab Labs will get the approval for the mark retweet granted because there might be a lot of objections to the application, not only from Twitter, who now seem to be in a unique position to claim the mark, but also from competitors such as Tweetmeme. Funnily enough, the whole RT concept is just another Twitter community driven and created component and it seems ironic at least if someone were able to claim the mark for a concept or term which is owned by the Community.
Franky is CEO, Editor and 21/7 Muppet on Duty at Splashpress Media. Occasionally he even sleeps. More sporadically even he also blogs about the professional online life at iFranky. He also is regular Guest Lecturer on all things blogging and 'web 2.0'ish'. Follow him on Twitter.
Not really a big deal I don’t think.
Like Myspace (and Facebook now).. within a few years Twitter too will decline and this whole retweet nonsense will get deprecated
It’s not just tweet, someone in my stream was really upset & blogged about this already (in the who does twitter think they are & forgetting who got them here manner); as a third party developer with twitter in the name, this twit had received a cease & desist.
Another case of history repeating itself!