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"With Twitter growing so dramatically and in so many directions over the last few months, it's probably no surprise that they have decided to expand their Terms of Service - the core rules that govern the use of Twitter.  The company announced the changes today in a detailed blog post.\nThe new TOS, which is far more expansive and specific than the old one, not only addresses privacy concerns, but ownership, spam, rights, and links.  The microblogging company said that, now that they better understand how users utilize Twitter, they can update the TOS to match.\nWhile there are many changes, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone highlighted four key areas in where they updated the TOS:\n\n\"Advertising\u2014In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We'd like to keep our options open as we've said before.\nOwnership\u2014Twitter is allowed to \"use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute\" your tweets because that's what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.\nAPIs\u2014The apps that have grown around the Twitter platform are flourishing and adding value to the ecosystem. You authorize us to make content available via our APIs. We're also working on guidelines for use of the API.\nSPAM\u2014Abusive behavior and spam is also outlined in these terms according to the rules we've been operating under for some time.\"\n\nThe new TOS has 15 sections which better encompasses potential issues on Twitter like privacy and ownership.  This change, as well as the announcement, was probably a necessary move to avoid the Facebook Terms of Service fiasco that occurred back in February.  \nThe two things that strike us though are the discussion of ads and that you own your tweets.  This TOS seems to be a starting point for adding advertising to the Twitter platform.  At the very least, it clearly says the option is open.  It is a major potential source of revenue, after all.\nOn tweet ownership: we're glad to hear that they are ours.  We worked hard to make all of those witty 140 character remarks, after all."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/09/10/twitter-tos/>