Twitter has already failed to win the trademark rights to Tweet on two occasions including once against TwittAd which trademarked the phrase “Let Your Ad Meet Tweets.” Twitter sued that company in Federal court and even removed their twitter username.

In a statement regarding their newest attempt Twitter said:

“It is in the best interests of our users and developers for the meaning of ‘Tweet’ to be preserved to prevent any confusion, so we are taking action to protect its meaning.”

In the meantime a “whipped-marshmallow manufacturer” has also attempted to trademark the name and so has an over-the-door metal hooks company and even a ‘bird remediation and pest control” system company.

To be honest I don’t think the word should be allowed to carry a trademark, a bird says “tweet tweet” and always has, the moment the trademark office allows company’s to trademark already commonly used words is the moment we should all realize big government has overstepped it’s bounds.

I personally only think of “Tweet” as part of Twitter when the context of a subject or sentence justifies that assumption such as “I’m going to Tweet about this.” Do you think Twitter should be able to control the word “Tweet” and how it’s used as part of the everyday lexicon?

Twitter Faces Uphill Battles As They Try To Trademark “Tweet” is a post from: The Inquisitr

A year after announcing the that the more commonly used “website” could replace the stuffier “Web site” per their widely adopted guidelines, the Associated Press has now updated the AP Stylebook to allow “email” to replace the rather AOL-ish “e-mail” originally used.

AP style is a bit of a mild stressor for bloggers, because despite generally adopting a more casual tone than old media news sources, we like to adhere to some convention of propriety in tone overall. Consistency is also something most writers appreciate, and it’s a pain in the ass to know something like “e-mail” is officially correct when it looks so dated and passé. (When the AP issued a final edict on the “website” versus “Web site” issue last year, both Steven and I posted glowingly about the change.)

Reaction on the Twitters has been almost universally excited, with tweeters (in a totally non-ornithological context) re-tweeting the message above and thanking God. “Email” wasn’t the only streamlined term gifted to tech writers by the AP- “cellphone” and “smartphone” officially got their special dispensation to be real words, retiring the clumsier-yet-then-preferred “cell phone” and “smart phone.” “Calcutta” has also been updated to “Kolkata” (and I will admit at first I thought this could be a new social network of which I was not yet aware) but this particular change did not spark the same giddiness as the other terms.

Which tech terms would you like to see the AP add to their stable of updates? Have the style gods completely caught up with the latest set of changes?

Triumph for consistency: AP updates Stylebook to allow “email” unhyphenated is a post from: The Inquisitr

Oooh, look at the fancy New York Times with their fancy fifty-cent zoological words!

Hot off the heels of their recent investigative piece on “bros icing bros,” the Times has issued an edict banning the colloquial term “tweet” from the Gray Lady’s pages when not used to describe avian activities. While Times writer Dave Itzkoff tweeted (TWEETED!) that the story posted by The Awl containing an email from the paper’s standards editor Phil Corbett “wasn’t true,” it appears that Corbett did write the email in question. (The writer snarkily -SNARKILY!- added “Not true, of course, but hey, it’s the Internet.”)

Itzkoff backpedaled, saying that the memo itself was real, but that “others wrote back to say they use ‘tweet.’” Corbett told Yahoo News that he can’t even convince Times writers to use proper grammar, much less force the lot of them to quit it with the new media slang:

“I think it wouldn’t really be right to say the word’s banned,” Corbett told Yahoo! News after the Awl’s post quickly bounced around the Twitterverse.

Corbett said that in straight news stories, “tweet” should be avoided except in special cases. As for banning, Corbett said he doesn’t actually have the power to issue such decrees. “I can’t even convince people to use ‘who’ and ‘whom’ correctly,” he said.

Corbett haughtily added:

“It’s guidance,” he said. “It’s trying to put people on alert that, in my humble opinion, ‘tweet’ is a word that hasn’t become … dictionary-level standard English.”

Wired points out that the AP Stylebook is perfectly cool with using “tweet” to describe Twitter transmissions, though:

…another arbiter of newspaper style — actually the Bible of journalism style — has no problem with the word “Tweet” at all.

In its entry on “Twitter” — added in 2009 — the AP Stylebook says this:

“A message-distribution system that allows users to post continual updates of up to 140 characters detailing their activities for followers or providing links to other content. The verb is to tweet, tweeted. A Twitter message is known as a tweet.

Full text of Corbett’s tweet-ban, below- the suggestion is to use the far more awkward “wrote” or “said on Twitter” in lieu of the banned word:

How About “Chirp”?

Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.

Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.

One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to “tweets” or “tweeting.” Someday, “tweet” may be as common as “e-mail.” Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and “tweet” may fade into oblivion. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly.)

“Tweet” may be acceptable occasionally for special effect. But let’s look for deft, English alternatives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you’ve established that Twitter is the medium, simply use “say” or “write.”

New York Times bans the word “tweet” when not used in “ornithological contexts” is a post from: The Inquisitr

In fact as Sam Johnston found out not only had Twitter tried to trademark the word before Biz even brought up the subject but they were turned down the same day. This is according to USPTO records (#77715815) which showed they had applied for the trademark on April 16, 2009

Sorry about your luck there Twitter but I am sure more than a few developers are breathing a sigh of relief as they break out the champagne.

No Tweet trademark for Twitter is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twitter pulled the plug on its outbound text messaging service for all of the UK last Thursday, saying the service was simply causing it to lose too much money. Needless to say, the decision drew plenty of negative reaction from users who came to rely on their text-based Tweets.

Now, though, two new companies have surfaced with hopes of filling the gap. TweetSMS first showed its face a few days ago, as profiled on Mashable. The soon-to-launch site promises to send individual, hourly, or daily SMS updates for “a very small fee.” TweetSMS’s site isn’t live yet but indicates it is coming “very soon.”

One step ahead, Australian-based TwitSMS made its debut over the weekend and is now fully functional. Founder Jeff Bonnes — a Twitter user himself — said he was annoyed at the discontinued SMS service and decided to take action, piecing his business together with his wife in a matter of days. TwitSMS is charging £0.07 per message for UK-based users. Australians will pay $0.11 AUD per text. The messages have to be purchased in advance packages of 100, 200, or 500.

In the meantime, BusinessWeek is predicting more changes ahead for Twitter users worldwide. The site has to find a way, it says, to start pulling in the dough. Its prediction? First banner ads, then possibly contextual ads within messages — and ultimately, BusinessWeek suspects, a full acquisition and integration into another existing service.

Services Springing Up to Replace Twitter SMS is a post from: The Inquisitr