Twitter Doesn't Want Flattr Favoriting Its Tweets

It's Spring and love is in the air. And Twitter, that coy mister/ress is at it again, smacking back third party suitors with a disinterest not seen since Scarlett O'Hara. The latest app whose advances Twitter has spurned is an interesting piece of sunshine called Flattr. And all it wanted was to pay content creators for their efforts. Yep, you and I lost out on THIS one. Flattr's entire purpose is to give microdonations to digital content creators. If you're someone who creates original content online, you can add a Flattr button to your website (to make it easier for folks to Flattr you with microdonations!): When a Flattr user "Likes", "Favorites" or "Stars" a piece of content on a participating service, the content creator is rewarded with a small payment. Nice, hmm? Apparently, Twitter didn't think so. Flattr blogged about its experience, saying "Twitter is forcing us to drop users ability to flattr creators by favoriting their tweets." [W]e are extremely sad to announce that from today (16th of April 2013) at noon CET we will remove the possibility to flattr tweets via the use of favorites, as per instructions from Twitter. What we do To enable support for flattring tweets we use two sources of data our users have created. The data about what a user favorited on Twitter, and the data about the tweet that was created. To do this we need a Twitter API key. What Twitter said Recently Twitter contacted us and told us that we are violating their API terms citing the second part of a clause (IV. Commercial Use, 2C. Advertising Around Twitter Content) saying “Your advertisements cannot resemble or reasonably be confused by users as a Tweet. For example, ads cannot have Tweet actions like follow, retweet, favorite, and reply. And you cannot sell or receive compensation for Tweet actions or the placement of Tweet actions on your Service.” We have tried to suggest different solutions asking for an exception to the terms, even forgoing our cut, etc, without any result. But, this does not mean that we will give up negotiating with them over this on behalf our users and also their users. But as of today, no dice. And, as we've mentioned before, maybe portraying Twitter in a blog post as a group of unreasonable jerks is not the best negotiating tactic. Possibly. But what do you think of this? Is Twitter being a bit jerky here or is Flattr's response . . . unflattering? (Image from Shutterstock)

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Twitter Doesn't Want Flattr Favoriting Its Tweets

Mary C. Long

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