[Air-L] Twitter Data Sharing Update - Thou Shalt Not Share Collections of Tweets

[Michael Zimmer]

Stu-

I'm not in full agreement with your starting point that tweets "yearn to be free".  I think the nature of the platform (140 character limit, broadcast as one voice among millions of accounts, viewed via a live stream that makes it almost impossible to read every single one) also supports the notion that tweets are meant to be fleeting. 

-michael



> On May 5, 2011, at 9:35 AM, Stuart Shulman wrote:
> 
>> Hi Michael,
>> 
>> We did not contest the violation warning and so we took the data down. The policy is another matter. These are tweets that yearn to be free, insofar as tweets can collectively yearn for anything:
>> 
>> http://bit.ly/ixJVHu
>> 
>> In this instance, I find myself liking the Facebook policy, which in an opposite manner sets data free. This may explain, in part, why the "Scraping Facebook" video seems to be getting more views than the one on harvesting Twitter tweets:
>> 
>> http://www.screencast.com/t/iW3rvdYY
>> 
>> ~Stu
>> 
>> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Michael Zimmer <zimmerm at uwm.edu> wrote:
>> It appears the Twitter API doesn't care if you're selling or giving it away, as I.4.a prohibits any attempt to "sell, rent, lease, sublicense, redistribute, or syndicate access to the Twitter API or Twitter Content to any third party without prior written approval from Twitter", as well as noting that "Exporting Twitter Content to a datastore as a service or other cloud based service, however, is not permitted"
>> 
>> http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms
>> 
>> I'm not justifying their terms, but it does appear that you violated them.
>> 
>> -mz
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Michael Zimmer, PhD
>> Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies
>> Co-Director, Center for Information Policy Research
>> University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
>> e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
>> w: www.michaelzimmer.org
>> 
>> 
>> On May 5, 2011, at 7:24 AM, Stuart Shulman wrote:
>> 
>>> Twitter closed down our efforts to share post-Osama bin Laden Twitter data
>>> (or any other collections) for research purposes, again citing their TOS &
>>> API TOS.
>>> 
>>> http://bit.ly/l8DSA3
>>> 
>>> To be clear: we were giving the data away, not selling it. Also, it was not
>>> scraped of Twitter. Rather, it was gathered using a Twitter-authorized
>>> account and an API that lets us fetch 1500 items at a time.
>>> 
>>> It is a shame that the now 2 million tweets cannot, for example, be sampled
>>> and coded using a crowd source model. Or could they?
>>> 
>>> I am assuming the provision against sharing data does not extend to
>>> individuals who gather it and keep it to themselves or work with it in a
>>> research team.
>>> 
>>> ~Stu
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> 
>>> Stuart Shulman
>>> President & CEO
>>> Texifter, LLC <http://www.texifter.com/>
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Have you tried DiscoverText?
>>> http://discovertext.com
>>> *Featuring the Facebook Graph & Twitter APIs*
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>> 
>>