I’m violating Twitter’s Display Guidelines

Recently there has been quite some turmoil in the blogosphere concerning Twitter’s upcoming API changes. While reading the blogpost announcing some of the changes I noted that Twitter would be shifting from Display Guidlines to Display Requirements. When reading the current Display Guidelines I noticed that I am currently violating these guidelines by displaying tweets underneath my blogposts along with blog comments: “Timelines. 5. Timeline Integrity: Tweets that are grouped together into a timeline should not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other networks.” Using a plugin called Topsy Retweet Button I’ve been experimenting with gathering the distributed commentspaces, comments posted across different social media platforms related to one single blogpost, underneath the blogpost. The Topsy plugin treats tweets as trackbacks and adds them to your blog’s comment/trackback section. Unfortunately, due to insufficient PHP skills I have been unable to separate Tweets and comments, but that no longer may be a blog priority since it violates Twitter’s terms of service. Tracking or aggregating distributed commentspaces on one’s own blog has become increasingly difficult with social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook increasingly limiting access to comments related to blog posts. I do not want to integrate a service such as Disqus due to cookies but would rather integrate them myself, but alas.

11 thoughts on “I’m violating Twitter’s Display Guidelines

  1. Pingback: Anne Helmond
  2. I don’t think you are in violation of anything. The writing is very vague. Also, there are many twitter plugins. And finally, what’s to fear from disqus? WordPress already uses cookies anyway. IMHO, you are putting yourself in a box based on faulty assumptions.

    1. While I agree that Twitter’s guidelines and proposed API changes are quite vague they could be interpreted as keeping Twitter “as it is.” They are very clear on how tweets should be displayed, for example displayed tweets should always show Reply, Retweet, and Favorite action icons (see 3a) and the Twitter logo/follow button (5b) which this plugin definitely doesn’t do.

      Which WordPress are you referring to, or both? Because I know WordPress.com has included Quantcast in their stats but I was under the naive impression my self-installed .org version was “clean.” I’m slowly trying to phase out all plugins that contain trackers (including Google Analytics) so this is a good thing to further investigate, thanks :)

  3. I don’t know much about wordpress.com.
    I believe JetPack in the dot org repository also uses Quantcast.

    Google has turned a bit evil. Perhaps Yahoo and it’s new CEO will figure out there is room in the market for an agnostic un-Google.

    BTW, I live in Limburg (at the moment) and I am getting ready to release a beta of an EPUB3 CMS. Shall I keep you informed of developments?

    Cheers
    Mike

  4. This raises another question: who has ownership of those tweets? Twitter? Or the tweep? I’m sure Twitter Inc. will claim all ownership from left to right and top to bottom, but that is not exactly reality :)

    If you, as poster of the tweet in question, are indeed owner of the tweet ( as I suspect ), twitter has now say whatsoever in how you present it, right?

      1. Quite remarkable, that twitter fights so hard on one hand, but seems to become more restrictive (API wise) on the other. I remember a similar case around twitter and various people linked to wikileaks. (Like our own Rop Gonggrijp)

        It does pose the question once again, if twitter says you own the posts, which seems entirely right to me, why would they limit what you do with them so much? Isn’t that in direct conflict with the social nature of the service they themselves seem to defend so much. (Against the US govt. no less, which is quite the uphill battle)

  5. I think a lot of blogs are in violation. Disqus also incorporates Tweets in which comments and trackbacks. I’m not sure how they separate them or if Disqus currently meets the Twitter Display Requirements. I use Disqus for my comments so for my blog this is a problem for Disqus to solve, unfortunately I have other PHP code that I want to meet the display requirements…

  6. I wonder if Disqus is working on this because on their “Aggregated mentions from Twitter” Help page they state that they “are currently optimizing the way we handle reactions” which could be a euphemism for “complying with Twitter’s rules.”

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