‘Irony at its best’ perfectly resumes the story about Twitter’s ‘tweet’ trademark application. According to blogger Sam Johnston the microblogging compny applied for the trademark in April 2009 already and was informed about the rejection the day Twitter announced the application, 01 July 2009. This announcement followed only days after Twitter told a developer that Tweet was their trademark in a email, a story uncovered by TechCrunch:
Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?
The reason why the application was rejected: other companies had previously applied for terms close to ‘tweet’ as Sam Johnston uncovered. Tweetmark, Cotweet and Tweetphoto are the applications which were annexed to the rejection.
Suddenly it seems as if the microblogging company is becoming the new online bully and the application for the term Retweet, almost 3 weeks after retweet.com was announced, is a perfect example of this. The @retweet account has been suspended since 13 August 2009, the day before Twitter filed application for the term ‘retweet’ (#77804841).
We can now continue our Tweet Herald plans without fear and I can change my name to Franky ‘MG’ Branckaute.
