Twitter Can’t Get Tweet Because Too Many Tweets Out There.

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twitter-logo.jpg‘Irony at its best’ perfectly resumes the story about Twitter’s ‘tweet’ trademark application. According to blogger Sam Johnston the microblogging compny applied for the trademark in April 2009 already and was informed about the rejection the day Twitter announced the application, 01 July 2009. This announcement followed only days after Twitter told a developer that Tweet was their trademark in a email, a story uncovered by TechCrunch:

Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own? [Read more…]

Twitter Claims Ownership of ‘Retweet’, A New Debacle In The Making?

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TwitterTogether 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.

NCAA Forces Rebranding Of March Madness Twitter Site

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When I learned about the MarchTweetness site, a Twitter powered thingy much like ExecTweets but focusing on NCAA March Madness basketball, using Twitter to cheer on your teams, I really wanted to see it. Well, I never could, and now we know why. NCAA made Federated Media, responsible for the site, take it down, due to trademark infringement. Ouch. Nothing about that in the FM blog post though, they’re blaming it on technical difficulties. Fine, in a way I guess it was!

Well, basketball fans can check it out now, under the new name of TitleTweets. Still sponsored by AT&T. This may not be Twitter’s business model, but it sure is an interesting one for ad agencies like Federated Media.