After Carping About NBC’s Olympics Coverage, Journalist Suspended from Twitter
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[0] Twitter to selectively 'censor' tweets by country. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16753729
There is no way you can go the media company route (vs. the api/infrastructure route) and not get this conflict.
It'd be better to take a look at things like status.net, or more low level solutions such as http://scripting.com/stories/2012/07/25/anOpenTwitterlikeEco....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/30/us-twitter-nbc-jou...
I was under the impression that non-business e-mails, phone numbers and addresses were considered private, but anything related to a business was fair game.
I think it's arguable whether his work address is "personal information" or not.
EDIT LoganCale points out that I am wrong. He's right.
"If information was previously posted or displayed elsewhere on the Internet prior to being put on Twitter, it is not a violation of this policy."
It's an email owned by a public company, that's about as public as you get.
* This is actually not directly from the ToS, but a Twitter support page which serves to clarify the part of the ToS which states this.
This is the same NBC that cancelled Star Trek, they clearly have not learned how to handle social interactions and feedback still from there customers and potentual customers.
It's a corporate business address, which makes it as socially acceptable as "send all your complaints to NBC c/o Gary Zenkel", and not against Twitter's policy.
I've been quite fond of it over the years, but if it starts engaging in vindictive censorship; then it becomes a poisoned well and can no longer be trusted.
For every "social media is changing our world" moment that pops up every few months there are 12,460,000,000 worthless tweets clogging up the other 89 days.
It seems to me that the primary use of the service is to provide an IV drip of useless information for update addicted. The "great" moments are purely incidental.
The trick is to follow your interests. If you don't care about world news, NASCAR, or celebrities, don't follow them.
While Twitter is the current market leader (imo mostly due to constant hyping by mainstream media who apparently feel "tweet" is of analogous magnitude as "email"), it could easily be replaced by any number of extant services, let alone potential future services.
Does this matter at all? Everything could be replaced by another service. Nothing is sacred. But what really matters isn't what will come, but what exists. Twitter exists. That's why it's used. I'm really not seeing your point.
Google has competitors, but they can't just upset Google overnight because it is really hard and takes a really long time to build a search facility of equivalent utility to the one Google provides. While some people challenge them, Google is still the objective king in searches, and companies with a huge amount of resources, like Microsoft, struggle to supplant Google in the quality of their offering.
Facebook is a very complex system with a lot of support for a lot of different things. Facebook is more in line with Twitter in that it's strongly dependent on network effects, but Facebook requires investment of significant time in building relationships and composing a profile; they have some reasonable sense of lock-in here. And if you've looked around, it is still difficult to develop a platform that does everything Facebook does (or more), especially with Facebook's rapid deployment of analogous features anytime a competitor tries to one-up them. They copied and thereby neutered the viability of Circles lickety-split and Google+ could no longer claim a significant feature advantage for those concerned about privacy.
Twitter is just a stream of short strings, easily scrapeable and convertible. The site can be cloned on a conceptual level in a couple of days. Twitter may have done some serious scaling work, but in the end they have no unique offering, no killer feature, nothing that a normal developer would have difficulty or serious effort duplicating at the conceptual level. Scalability of course takes time, but it's highly implementation dependent and occurs as necessary; Twitter's internal performance is not a serious user-facing barrier or feature. In fact, Facebook and Google+ already include all the functionality of Twitter.
There is no reason to stay on Twitter other than pure network effects.
Given the massive role Twitter played in Egypt's protests, I wonder if such a thing would still be possible given Twitter's current corporate philosophy. And the fact that I even have to wonder that, now, is why we're blaming Twitter.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/?tab=wX#110741260330832413403/po...
-- No email address's were hurt during this post.
Wait, what? Social media didn't exist in 2008?