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Twitter Gossip

Twitter Gossip rounds up the latest news and opinion about everyone's favorite social media tool, Twitter.com. Daily updates will bring you the buzz of the day regarding Twitter, as well as links to interesting uses of Twitter, new apps and tools, and other fun tidbits.

Controversy brews over Twitter harassment policyMay 27

A controversy surrounding Twitter’s terms of service erupted after popular blogger Ariel Waldman wrote that she had been harassed via Twitter for over a year and the company did nothing to stop it. According to Ars Technica, Twitter did remove some offending posts from the public timeline last year after Waldman complained. However, more recent tweets and the offending user’s account were not removed.

In a post to the official company blog co-founder Biz Stone responded saying that “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content.” Waldman contends that Twitter’s terms of service, which were borrowed from Flickr, place an obligation on the company to police what she feels is an online community. Twitter announce it is reviewing its terms.

On the legal front, internet lawyer John Dozier Jr. told Wired that “Twitter may have r

Twitter: ‘We’re not sure what’s happening’May 22

In an untitled and verbose blog post yesterday, Twitter admitted it does not know what is causing its frequent service outages and asked for patience from users. “We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening.”

CNet’s Dave Rosenberg (@daveofdoom) warns Twitter that if it can’t keep its service up, it will suffer the fate of Friendster.

Twitter raises $15 million in new funding roundMay 22

GigaOm reports that Twitter has completed a new round of venture capital funding. “The update is that Twitter reached an agreement with investors today to raise $15 million in funding at around $80 million pre-money valuation.” TechCrunch speculates that the VC firm in question is Spark Capital.

Twitter outage spurs rebuke from bloggers, contestMay 21

Twitter suffered another serious outage yesterday sparking a strong wave of criticism from bloggers.

One frequent complaint was Twitter’s lack of communications with users during outages. “[H]ow about just having enough respect for your users to let us know what’s going on, asked TechCrunch. Meanwhile VentureBeat noted that during major outages the official blog is rarely updated and it’s unclear to users where else to look for official information. Twitter finally posted a terse note on its blog taking responsibility for the outage.

Meanwhile, CNET’s Molly Wood (@mollywood) launched a contest to build a Twitter competitor. “I have had it with this Twitter situation,” she wrote. After consulting with software engineers, Wood is convinced that a better-scaling Twitter analog can be built in hours. To entice someone to build it, she offered some incentives:

I will go there, for a test period of not more than 30 days, and I will beg all of my followers to join me for this test period (as of this writing, a nice round 6,700). My colleague, Tom Merritt, says he’ll go

TweetCube adds filesharing to TwitterMay 21

ZDNet points us to TweetCube, a new service that allows users to share files on Twitter. “Log-in to your Twitter account via TweetCube’s site (user names and passwords aren’t stored), then upload the file you want to share: images, videos, music, PDFs and more. Next, add a message and hit publish. The result shows up on your Twitter stream with a shortened URL linking to a page hosting the file on TweetCube.” The service allows Twitter to replicate some of the functionality of Pownce, although files are limited to 10MB and are stored for only 30 days.