Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications

techcrunch.com

28 pointsaj23 comments

This is ridiculous. On Nov 21st 2008 a representative from Twitter said this,

"There are certainly many applications out there that include Twitter as part of their name, but we prefer that you not do so. Twit, Tweet etc. are all fine."

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:SGqicWFJttIJ:groups.goog...

Many people, myself included, acted upon this information in good faith (and in my case at a monetary cost for a domain name containing the word "tweet").

Does this public pronouncement affect their legal standing when it comes to defending the trademark "tweet"?

Edit: Should I continue with this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677643

It seems that they have the same problem the App Store has now - mixed messages as to what is acceptable, and no clear public guidelines.

Since they now have a trademark application in the works, they _must_ try to enforce it. When a company consistently neglects to enforce it's trademark and it becomes part of the language, it becomes a genericized trademark. it ends up in the same boat as "kleenex" and "xerox" and may not be enforceable in the future - a.k.a "genericide".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark

I propose (well, actually Stephen Colbert proposed it) that Twat be the new Tweet.

I liked Merlin Mann's suggestion of "toot".

Furthermore, my friends and I have started referring to direct messages as "queefs".

I know it's unlikely that anyone here will miss this, but note http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682896 - the website Twitter was concerned about was TweetKnot, which looks pretty much exactly like a Twitter knock-off, down to the graphics.

OK, contest time. Let's find the future word for microblogged statements.

Is there a way to run such a contest in such a way that every suggested word is automatically free for all to use forever (unless it was trademarked before)? I almost fear no :-(

On the other hand when I tried to trademark a word in Germany, it was rejected because it was deemed too common (I didn't think so, but whatever). So maybe if one could make a case that, say, the word "mext" was already a common name for microblogging statements, nobody could trademark it for that anymore? Just when is it common enough - winning a competition would probably be insufficient?

A short, genericized name for the category is a good idea.

The existing descriptions -- 'status updates', 'activity streams', 'microblogging' -- are awkward for casual/verbed usage.

Possible veins of meaning to mine include:

* similarity to instant-messaging, but more public -- Public Instant Messaging, or PIMming. "I pimmed it." "Check out my pims on Facebook, Twitter, or Laconi.ca."

* similarity to loud-talking -- "shouting". (Could be a prefix letter to IM, as above, to "SIMming" or "SHIMing", or given an e-prefix like e-mail, "e-shouting".)

* conversely, similarity to talking to oneself -- "mumbling", mumble-IM ("mimming", "mimbling"), e-mumbling. (It's interesting that the activity is like both shouting and mumbling in different ways.)

* similarity to 'texting' (as I think your 'mext' example alludes to) -- public-texting ("pexting"), loud-texting ("lexting"), txt-blogging ("togging" or "tlogging"), blog-texting ("blexxing").

Swick - swift talk

This is not a real word. The only swicks in Wikipedia are proper names.

It is nearby a bunch of words, I suppose. Sick, Sweet, Stick, Slick, Squick.

Also nice because it suffixes neatly: swicked, swicking, swicks, swicker, swiction.

I use Twitter, but I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with it.

There's no revenue stream for Twitter, except for hitting up investors. Those investors expect a return. What is Twitter going to do to try to pay them back? Targeted ads (cool)? Detailed user demographics (not cool)?

Why try to kick the feet out from under the people actually building an ecosystem around their product? I can understand trying to keep a clear separation between Twitter and that ecosystem for branding purposes, but I think this goes beyond that need.

Does anyone actually believe they will be pursuing companies using tweet or twit in URLs?

Yes. Consider this hypothetical scenario.

Twitter builds image sharing as part of twitter.com at say twity.com. But twitpic.com is beating them all the way(better implementation, user inertia whatever).

Is it hard to see someone at twitter, try to use their trademark to beat them?

[Edit]

Also in their response Twitter says,

> As part of this support, we encourage developers of new applications and services built using Twitter APIs to invent original branding for their projects rather than use our marks, logos, or look and feel.

And says nothing on whether using tweet in names is acceptable by them. If they don't mind, wgy not say so?

I honestly cannot see Twitter "building" anything new outside of their current feature set. If they are going to add a native image service, they're going to buy one of the current popular services (twitpic, yfrog, etc.) and integrate that.

Come on, they had to buy a search company to give people the ability to search their index, so the precedent is certainly there.

Autocrattic (www.automattic.com) already does this for wordpress and wp in urls. So yeah it is a possible scenario

"Twit" is a trademark owned by Leo Laporte, and if you use it in your name he will come knocking.

I was uncomfortable with it when twitter first came out just due to the sheer ridiculousosity of it.

You can't trademark a word that's in the English dictionary can you?

Apple?

I don't think they have "Apple" trademarked. Their trademark is Apple Inc. (and formerly Apple Computer) And yea, that name has brought on some lawsuits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v._Apple_Computer

They definitely have Apple, as well as a number of other common English words.

http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html

Some amusing entries:

Aperture, Apple, Aqua, Bonjour, Boot Camp, Capitals, Carbon, Charcoal, Chicago, Cocoa, Exposé, Gadget, Inkwell, Instruments, Keychain, Keynote, Leopard, Logic, New York, Numbers, Pages, Panther, Photo Booth, Quartz, Rosetta, Safari, Sand, Shake, Shuffle, Soundtrack, Spaces, Spotlight, Techno, Textile, Tiger, Time Capsule, Time Machine, Tremor, Tubes.

This is okay because trademarks have namespaces. It's just that namespace collisions result in lawsuits.

Let's not forget Windows

"If Microsoft loses the trademark battle, it will have a much more difficult time fending off imitators that promote their products with variations of the same name. Company officials say customers would be in danger of buying inferior products and that rivals would effectively get a free ride at Microsoft's expense."

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/25/business/microsoft-tradema...

Generic ("beer" or "cold beer") and purely descriptive terms ("computer repair") cannot be trademarked. Terms that are suggestive, arbitrary, or fanciful can be registered, with fanciful getting the most protection.

However, if an otherwise descriptive term has become associated in the public mind with the products of one competitor, then the term acquires what is called a "secondary meaning" and can thereby be registered as a protectable trademark.

Secondary meaning usually is the result of a massive and long-term marketing campaign (e.g., "Windows").

That is the general terrain for this area. Using these standards, common words that appear in a dictionary can wind up being protected as trademarks.

I think the issue with "tweet" is not yet decided. Time will tell on how this will come out.

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