UberTwitter axed. Why did Twitter target the popular app?

Twitter is taking off the kid gloves. Earlier today, Twitter announced that it had cracked down on several third-party apps, including UberTwitter, UberCurrent, and Twidroyd – all of which, Twitter reps alleged, "have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways."

"We ask all developers in the Twitter ecosystem to abide by a simple set of rules that are in the interests of our users, as well as the health and vitality of the platform as a whole," Twitter reps wrote in a statement released to reporters today. "We often take actions to enforce these rules; in fact, on an average day we turn off more than one hundred services that violate our API rules of the road. This keeps the ecosystem fair for everyone."

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UberTwitter, UberCurrent, and Twidroyd are creations of a company called UberMedia, whose CEO claimed in a recent CNN article that the company had a "good relationship with Twitter." So how did UberMedia run afoul of the powers-that-be at the social media giant?

Twitter reps have remained vague on the specific nature of the infringements, saying only that "the violations include, but aren't limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users' Tweets in order to make money."

Over at TechCrunch, reporter Leena Rao calls the move by Twitter a declaration of "war. [A]llegations of privacy violations and trademark infringement are serious." It's worth noting that we still don't know exactly how UberMedia infringed upon Twitter copyright. Was it the bird in the UberTwitter logo?

For her part, Rao speculates that the trademark infringement charges "most probably refers to the terms UberTwitter or Tweetdeck, since Twitter frowns on the use of either Tweet or Twitter in a third-party developers name."

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