Martin Gordon's Blog

Twitter may be dying, but not for the reason you might think. It's not a matter of it not being monetized, or the servers crashing under popularity, or people losing interest. The reason is its name.

Last night, Leo Laporte, Chief TWiT, announced he was leaving Twitter to avoid confusion between it and the TWiT (This Week In Tech) network, especially in light of mashups like Twit Box, Twit This, etc. The now deleted Tweet said: "I've asked Ev to delete my Twitter account. I'm concerned about confusion with TWiT. I'm moving to Jaiku: account is ChiefTWiT. CU there!"

Robert Scoble thinks Leo is setting up for a trademark suit, since Leo does own the TWiT trademark. He's not doing it to be evil, but to simply protect his trademark. Trademark law states that if you don't protect a trademark, it enters the public domain.

Leo moved to Jaiku and I noticed right away it was down, no doubt due to Leo's switch. Leo is the most popular Twitter user according to Twitterholic, and his move also prompted Scoble (#3) and Paul Terry Walhus (#10) to jump onto Jaiku. That's three of the top 10 Twitter users that have moved to a competing service. And it's not just in the short head: there's been a lot of buzz on Jaiku, as a Twittersearch reported 210 tweets in the past 9 hours mentioned the competing service.

I don't see Twitter disappearing tomorrow, but Evan Williams (founder of Obvious, the company behind Twitter) needs to change the name of the service yesterday if he wants to keep Twitter's 1999-like growth going. The sooner Twitter becomes something else, the less time people have to rally behind Leo on Jaiku. For the sake of TWiT/Twitter fans, this needs to get resolved right away.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, TWiT, Jaiku, This Week In Tech, Leo Laporte, Twitterholic, trademark

There is currently a bill out there in the British Parliament that, if passed, "will make it illegal to combine words like 'games', 'medals', 'gold', '2012', 'sponsor' or 'summer' in any form of advertising." Violators can be punished by fines of up to £20,000. So basically, anyone who isn't an official sponsor must completely ignore the Olympics are taking place. Will movie studios be sued because their movies are coming out in "summer 2012"? Will developers come under fire when they issue a press release mentioning that a video game has gone gold?

Sure, the word "Windows" is an every day word and it's trademarked, but you don't see Microsoft going around suing Home Depot for selling window treatments. The difference between "Windows" and the words the IOC is trying to effectively trademark is that the IOC's words include a year and a season. Not only that, since they have sponsors in a vast number of industries (from airliners to restaurants to clothing manufacturers), they can claim that practically anything using "their" words is an infringing use of those trademarks.

How much of our every day language will companies be able to own? Will we have to eventually pay royalties for every word we post in our blog or send over IM? What if we had a word surcharge line on our cell phone bills?

You know, I have to make money to survive. I'm going to get legislation passed that prevents any advertisers from using dollar and cents signs and periods. After all, why should other people cash in at my expense?

(from the BBC via Slashdot)

Technorati Tags: olympics, london, trademarks, government, 2012, games