Twitter Fails To Trademark ‘Tweet’

I love Twitter. I’ve also personally met co-founder Biz Stone, and he’s a great guy. That said, it does appear that they’ve strayed from their normal play book and are instead reading from the lesser-known Clue(less) Train Manifesto.

If bad news comes in threes, let’s hope that the recent DDoS attack, directional blindness, and today’s trademark faux pas, complete Twitter’s trifecta of incompetence.

After scaring the snot out of Twitter application developers–with its announced plans to trademark the term "tweet"–it now seems that the USPTO has rejected the application. It appears that at least three other companies submitted their "tweet" trademark applications before Twitter, and as Sam Johnston succinctly puts it…

…Twitter has a snowflake’s chance in hell of securing a monopoly over the word "Tweet"

Hmm, I’ve not seen too many snowflakes in hell recently, have you?

But honestly, it’s probably for the best that Twitter didn’t get its way with "tweet." After all, Twitter users and developers have been using the term for years now, and Twitter really should have filed its application a lot earlier.

To be fair, Twitter’s not the only social network to suffer growing pains such as these, but let’s hope that the company is now over its "awkward" years.