Cybersquatted Twitter Names

Posted on September 19th, 2009 by admin in Domain News | 1 Comment »

A new cyber-squatting trend is sweeping the web – people squatting on popular brands’ Twitter API application names.

Techcrunch already reported that it’s name has been cyber-squatted via a Twitter API based application – a common occurrence because of a poorly planned API interface according to Nik Cubrilovic of TechCrunch as the Twitter API allows you to register any application name and link it to any link you want.

Hypothetically you could create an application called Google and link it to anything you want and make it appear like a Google application is “tweeting” stuff or more worryingly that users of your app are tweeting via the Google app. That is quite a hole.

Even though username squatting is against Twitter rules, it is not stopping people trading in names via the Twee exchange for example.

The accounts the TechCrunch article linked to as examples have already been suspended by Twitter however I suspect they will be taking a look at their application API in the near future to try and eradicate this loophole.