Last Tweets Users See On Banned Client Twidroyd Pushed By Twitter

This morning Twitter shut down UberMedia clients UberTwitter and Twidroyd because of privacy violations for tweets more than 140 characters, monetization violations (concerning affiliate links) as well as trademark infringement.  While UberMedia CEO Bill Gross tells us that UberMedia is doing what ever it takes to get the apps back up, currently the final (and only tweets for some users) tweets you can see on the Twidroyd  Android app are the below from Twitter’s @support account.

UberTwitter, twidroyd, and UberCurrent have been suspended due to policy violations. Read more here: http://t.co/HHGa9k1

— Support (@Support) February 18, 2011

http://twitter.com/Support/status/38671104612499456

The first tweet announces the news and the second is a direct link to Twitter’s official app. Twidroyd users did not have to be following the @support account in order to receive the tweets, they were forced by Twitter. According to a thread on Hacker News, this is what happens when a banned app keeps making Twitter API calls.

Gobbling up Twitter clients in the past couple of months, UberMedia will control 20% of tweets if its acquisition of Tweetdeck is finalized. Did Twitter, who was late to the game when developing its own in-house apps (mostly through an acquisition of  3rd party client Tweetie), just take down the app market leader in order to promote its own?

While this could just be Twitter’s innocent way of breaking the news to app owners (it also sent an email in conjunction with the announcement), it seems like, at least to some, an interesting way to get the message across.

Thanks: Fried_Yoda