So now Twitter has revised its terms of Service. In a mail sent by Biz Stone, he announced that the folks down at the start-ups office have gained a better understanding of how users use their service and hence have updated the TOS.
Twitter learns from Facebook -
As in case with Facebook, who realized the hard way, the main issue is the wording in these hard to understand TOS which is filled with Lawyer Speak and not in English. Twitter has done well to sugar-coat its new TOS in a recent blog post and explain to its users in brief what it comprises of.
First and foremost : Your content belongs to you.
They seemed to have learnt well (once again, probably from FB) that things go wrong when you mess around with people’s content so they are declaring openly that “all your tweets do NOT belong to us” and you are the owner of all the content you post on Twitter, however, Twitter can use the content in any way it wants to without having to pay you royalty.
API guidelines -
Twitter also has drafted certain guidelines for third parties using Twitter’s APIs (which they’re still working on) which basically again asks the parties to seek permission from people to use their tweets.
Back to square one?
Despite saying that advertising is the least interesting form of revenue generation and that it features pretty low in their books, Twitter is leaving doors open for advertisers. I suppose Biz realises that innovative or not, advertising is still a good way to make money online (FB rakes in 300-400 million USD from it every year).
Let’s face it, Twitter hasn’t really posted anything groundbreaking, it’s simply presented their terms in a more user friendly manner. You always had intellectual property rights over your tweets (check previous TOS here) and advertisements (in the form of sponsored tweets) have been running on Twitter for quite some time (check those little suggestions in the sidebar as well as this blog post). But what it has done is win the goodwill of the people who now feel that Twitter cares about their content.
