Last Friday, the 18th, Twitter suspended two applications for violations of their policies: UberSocial (formally known as UberTwitter) and twidroyd. It never really stated in public what the exact violations were.

In a thread on Quora the CEO of UberMedia (parent company of UberTwitter) Bill Gross states that the problems involved:

• a third-party service (tmi.me), used to split tweets longer than 140 characters, was posting private messages on a public website
• UberCurrent (another twitter client of UberMedia, for the iPhone) was changing links that were part of an affiliate program to their own
• the name UberTwitter

UberMedia has remedied these problems and now is back in business.

I personally used UberTwitter until I started getting error messages that just said “Forbidden”. Switching to the “official” Blackberry client cured the issue. But I wasn’t the only one using UberTwitter. A lot of celebrities such as Lance Armstrong were using it, and went silent over the weekend.

I’m not sure if I’ll switch back to UberTwitter. That, and the fact that Twitter can suspend clients in a heart beat, shows once again the danger of building your business on another company’s platform. Whether that’s Twitter, or Apple, or Google, or Microsoft…