Twitter said Friday that it has suspended the UberTwitter and twidroyd apps for violating the company's API policies.
In a support post to the company's Web site, Twitter reported that both apps had violated the company's policies. A spokesman provided additional explanation.
"Today we suspended several applications, including UberTwitter, twidroyd and UberCurrent, which have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways," Matt Graves, a spokesman for Twitter, said in an email. "These violations include, but aren't limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users' Tweets in order to make money.
"We've had conversations with UberMedia, the developer of these applications, about policy violations since April 2010, when they first launched under the name TweetUp – a term commonly used by Twitter users and a trademark violation," Graves added ."We continue to be in contact with UberMedia and hope that they will bring the suspended applications into compliance with our policies soon."
Twitter's blog post also stated that the company requests that clients work with its API Terms of Service, which includes the prohibition that those that use the API "don't surprise users" by changing the content of tweets, among other violations.
"Regardless of how you access Twitter, we are dedicated to making Twitter better, faster and more reliable for you," Twitter said. "As part of this effort, we ask applications that work with Twitter to abide by a simple set of rules that we believe are in the interests of our users, and the health and vitality of the Twitter platform as a whole. We often take actions to enforce these rules.
"We have suspended UberTwitter and twidroyd for violating our policies," the site said. "Every day, we suspend hundreds of applications that are in violation of our policies," Twitter added.
Although the applications are typically used by a small fraction of users, both UberTwitter and twidroyd are far more popular.
In the meantime, however, Twitter recommended that users download the official Twitter client for Blackberry and Android in the interim.
