Saturday, March 5, 2011

Twitter no longer whitelisting researchers

So this came as sad news for me, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_recent_changes_to_twitters_terms_of_service_mi.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
I believe Twitter is a great source for sociologists, psychologists, market researchers and etc.. and I am sad to hear this.. though yes there are privacy concerns about tweets that are later removed.. see the related tweets


@
@ @ Yes I thought the same this morning. It's very old stuff, last year or so...only the whitelisting thing.

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Mirco Musolesi
@ Also: you can still redistribute content but not in order to "substitute" Twitter. Otherwise Twitter clients should be illegal :)

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Mirco Musolesi
@
@ They were not able to share them also before or better they had to support deletions (they had to mirror Twitter...impossible).

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Vijay Erramilli
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@ Ok learnt from a source in Twitter - the article has tons of errors. Nothing has changed except whitelisting.

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Mirco Musolesi
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@ But I agree that the removal of the whitelist might be a problem for collecting large datasets...

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Mirco Musolesi
@
@ These are not new changes. They were made last year as far as I know. Not major changes anyway -

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Suksant Sae Lor
@
@ well, we're using twitter to complain about twitter's policy lol sorry twitter, but ur data can be very useful!

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Suksant Sae Lor
@
@ and will MPI comply? Just curious...

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Suksant Sae Lor
@
@ thank you Hamed : ) this is ashamed since the crawled data is so useful... I'm sure they will make it into business somehow : (
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Tristan Henderson
@
@ Rubbish! Just because I am willing to make data public for one purpose doesn't mean you can use them. See @'s WWW talk.

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Suksant Sae Lor
@ I'm referring to the change of twitter policy that prevent crawling... Thank you : )

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Suksant Sae Lor
@ could u pls kindly give me a link to the source? I couldn't find it... Thank you Hamed.

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guppiefish
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@ Guess we need a Tweet federation protocol (even if Twitter resist :)

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Tristan Henderson
@
@ identi.ca? I still maintain that crawling the OSNs without users' consent is on dodgy ethical ground though.

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Vijay Erramilli
@
@ Worse is prohibiting data already crawled.. This is problematic indeed..


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hamed haddadi
@
@ so now we have a few institutions who have the data for few years, but they cant share it! it is a difficult situation
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hamed haddadi
@
@ not sure what the source is.. though Twitter has also emailed MPI asking them not to share the data we previously collected !

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hamed haddadi
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@ @ maybe! I still go 4 open model :) twitter is not doing this 4public sake anyway I guess. prob 4 prevention of legal battles.

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hamed haddadi
@
@ I think facebook maybe, but twitter.. if u r publicly & globally announcing something. u shoudl be prepared 4 it 2 stay with u forever
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hamed haddadi
@ ah.. genius.. why hasn't this taken off yet then!.. maybe the uncool name? why didn't they drop the "source" from the name!

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hamed haddadi
so.. seems like we need an open version of twitter.. opentweet..., like wikipedia.. no ads, decentralized and publicly accessible..
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hamed haddadi
@
@ yeah i wonder if they'll ask MPI/KAIST to remove the datasets.. we already actually have 1-2 papers under review too
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hamed haddadi
WOW.. Twitetr changes policy and no longer allows crawls .. what a shame for social science research