Twitter files appeal in major social media case

Jeff John Roberts provides an update on Twitter’s latest legal battle over at GigaOM. I think it’s fascinating that Twitter is living two lives:

They’re vigorously defending the rights of their users to maintain control over what happens to their tweets with regard to the government. They’re also perfecting a a cold hostility toward third-party developers.

These two strategies feel, for obvious reasons, very different from one another. But they are both directed at achieving the same two goals:

to maximize the user-base, particularly to keep Twitter attractive to dissidents, protesters, journalists, and others whose use cases may involve sensitive or vulnerable action or information
to maximize Twitter’s control over user-generated content (mostly individual tweets) and how it is consumed by users

It’s a great time to be a Twitter user who is happy with the service’s in-house apps and undaunted by their increasing bloat. It is a very bad time to be someone interested in providing Twitter users with a better experience that Twitter itself is willing or able to do.