FTC may be probing of Twitter policies

Jeff Bliss and Brian Womack//July 4, 2011//

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has begun contacting software makers as part of a preliminary inquiry into whether Twitter Inc.’s business practices harm competition, two people familiar with the matter said.

The FTC is responding to complaints that Twitter is making it harder for some software developers to design applications that run in concert with the company’s service, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter hasn’t been made public.

The agency has been taking a more active role in examining the behavior of large Internet companies in recent months. Last month, Google Inc., the world’s biggest Internet-search provider, said it had received a subpoena from the FTC regarding a broad antitrust probe into its dominance.

“With the kind of actions we see the FTC taking, we think it unlikely that much will come out of this other than getting Twitter to behave more gingerly with its developer partners,” Nitsan Hargil, director of research at GreenCrest Capital Management in New York, said in an e-mail. “We don’t expect any official censure.”

Peter Kaplan, an FTC spokesman, declined to comment, as did Sean Garrett, a spokesman for San Francisco-based Twitter.

Twitter, which allows people to communicate in 140-character messages, has seen its usage surge since the company was founded four years ago. The website is now used by 13 percent of U.S. adults online, up from 8 percent in November, as more older Americans embrace the service, according to a report last month by the Pew Research Center in Washington.

Twitter, competing with social-networking service Facebook Inc., is trying to improve its products and attract more users and advertisers. Last year, the company added more features that matched what independent Twitter developers were already doing, such as applications for smartphones.

One developer, UberMedia, said in an e-mailed statement yesterday that “we have been contacted by the FTC and we intend to fully comply with their request for information.”