Dear Twitter,

We go way back. Over two years, in fact.  Tech years work like dog years, and I’m pretty sure that equates to something like 50 years.  Anyway.

I read in this ReadWriteWeb post, a company called InfoChimps made their intentions of selling Twitter data public in their blog.  Your founder Biz Stone asked that they refrain until some sort of terms of service were created but then never contacted InfoChimps again.  InfoChimps, not getting any word from you, pressed forward.

I’ve heard the InfoChimps guys are nice guys, but come on.  All my days at Barton Springs tweets.  All the stupid signs I post from Amy’s Ice Cream or links to YouTube videos of equestrian style bunnies.  Can any Joe Shmoe off the street just decide he’s going to compile all of the interactive haikus I call tweets and sell it to someone who wants to figure out how to scam me?  Where is all of this data going, exactly?

I <3 you guys and always come to your defense when people say you are crazy and have no business model.  It’s in the search and the data, I say.  But when you give it up to just anybody without so much as a set of Terms of Service for who can and cannot sell your data, well, it makes my tweets feel a bit cheap, honestly.  I mean, who’s going to pay for the data when you can just steal the tweets for free?

I hope you consider that I’m not so into the idea of just anyone selling my little 140 character lifestream to the highest bidder.  When you consider that Seesmic, Loopt, Brightkite and other services dependent on your API feature geolocation, that’s flat out creepy.

Please pay attention to who can sell your data.  I’ve mentioned way too many words that start with the letters T and W to consider that Twitter could go downhill because our lives in 140 characters are being sold to the highest bidder.

Sincerely,
Michelle

[Editor’s Note: Michelle Greer has been a longtime member of the SiliconANGLE community of contributors, and now works for one of our sponsors: Rackspace. –mrh]