Twitter has had a rocky relationship with developers and a judge ordered the social network to continue providing data to PeopleBrowsr. A temporary restraining order was granted by a San Francisco Superior Court judge. January 8th, 2013 has been set as the hearing for the preliminary injunction.
PeopleBrowsr is a social media marketing and analytics company. They’ve used Twitter’s data for the past four years to create some of their own products. Here’s what Jodee Rich, Founder and CEO of PeopleBrowsr had to say:
“Today’s decision was a good result. We relied on Twitter’s promise of openness when we invested millions of dollars and thousands of hours of development time. Long term supply is essential as this industry matures. We made this application to ensure full unrestricted access to the Firehose for our Enterprise and Government clients.”
The company also helped pioneer Kred which is a competitor to Klout, a go-to service for measuring online influence. In the application for a temporary restraining order, Twitter responded with this statement:
“This is Contracts 101. Although PeopleBrowsr attempts to dress its case up as some sort of grand antitrust or interference case, it is not. The operative facts could not be simpler, or more dispositive. PeopleBrowsr and Twitter negotiated, at arm’s length, an integrated contract with a one year term, after which either party could terminate at will after giving 30 days’ notice. Twitter has exercised that contractual right. PeopleBrowsr attempts to ignore the plain language of the contract by imagining completely different contract, arguing that ‘Twitter contracted to provide an open ecosystem.’ … Nonsense.”
Twitter has continued to restrict API partners and this is just the beginning of a battle with one of those partners. For the full court document, you can read below.
