Twitter Starts To Act Like Apple By Making Life Hard For Developers, Shuts Down StatTweets

We've all heard the stories about Apple rejecting apps from the iTunes App Store for arbitrary reasons. Now Twitter is raising some hackles for shutting down accounts for no good reason. In this case, the accounts belong to StatTweets , which was created by Robbie Allen, the developer behind sports stat site StatSheet . StatTweets was a way to get sports scores and updates about your favorite NBA, NFL, and college teams. What did Allen do wrong? Twitter cited violations to its terms of service including "copyright infringement," "mass account creation," and "squatting" (you can read all the details on the StatSheet blog ). It was probably the second issue that got him into hot water. Over the course of a weekend, he and his wife (manually) created 650 Twitter accounts, one for each team, with each account drawing data from that team's page on StatSheet. It probably looked like spam to Twitter, but simply looking at some of the accounts would show that they were not spam. In fact, all together the accounts attracted 63,000 followers, which indicates that some people found them useful.