It’s a shame because we thought it was fun and a good idea.

Apparently, we weren’t the only ones.

Around the same time, someone launched a Facebook app that executed on most of our roadmap, but this time for Facebook status updates. Strangely, neither of them seemed to get as much flack as we did.

Furthermore, CNN and Current make money from tweets and Facebook statuses with every integration they launch. How? More eyeballs and longer page visits, which directly translates into ad dollars for them.

Today, Skittles launched a homepage that pulls in pages from around the web, including a Twitter search stream for mentions of “skittles”. To think there isn’t revenue being generated from this is a little bit silly.

I think there’s really only one major difference between what we tried with ChoiceTweets, and with these other models:

We were 100% honest and upfront with where the money was going when tweets were being printed. Yes, at the onset, that may have not been in the twitter users’ pockets. But the direct path to revenue being drawn seemed to stir up anger in a lot of people. Maybe it’s simply having revenue waved in their faces and not being a part of that pipeline. I can understand that reaction. Heck, I can appreciate that reaction.

Should Skittles.com require that every tweet it shows on it’s home page be licensed for reprint?

Should CNN require that every Facebook status be given permission to be shown on their Inauguration feed?

The lines are blurry.

A few weeks back, Andy Clarke and Brian Suda launched TweetCC as an attempt to catalog users who opted in to a creative commons public domain on all of their tweets. The reason? Andy wanted to include tweets in a book he was publishing, and the publisher needed the Tweets’ author’s permission in order to do. In many situations, ours included, this can be a tall order.

I really dig what Andy and Brian pulled off, and think it’s a decent start. Admirably, they gathered over 1,600 opt in users. But out of the millions (we don’t know the exact number, but without API traffic considered, they had over 7 million unique visits in January 2009, so millions should be accurate) of users, 1600 is a drop in the bucket.

Is this an uphill battle? Do we consider re-launching ChoiceTweets and be the only game in town respecting authors copyrights?

What do you think?

There was a brief mention in one of the comments prior about “overheard” and “retweet” style tweets, where the author of the tweet and the originator of the content are not the same. Clearly, we don’t have any way of reaching out through twitter to the person the twitter author overheard, tapping them on the shoulder, and asking them to sign a release. Or do we? Should we?

This entire discussion raises the question, how many layers of attribution are there, and how effective is the current copyright at protecting those who are being attributed?

You’ve all been so vocal already, so please: discuss!

• There is no mechanism for authors to “opt in” to allow their shirts to be purchased. We’ve taken a reactionary stance, short term, while deciding how we move forward.
• While many authors have said that they don’t mind so long as we give attribution, others understandably are upset about the potential for us to make profit without their inclusion or permission.

Many of the comments we’ve received are that the idea is good, but some pieces of it were not completely thought through. We are working hard to improve the site so that content creators are back in control of their content as related commercial use.

Actions

We’ve been blacklisting accounts upon request while we determine an efficient and effective way to notify authors of their tweets going on shirts without it turning into spam. We appreciate that many people have been civil about their requests.

This morning we have temporarily removed the “buy this shirt” link from the website. We did not want it to appear as if we were attempting to “stall” the issue”. In the mean time, people can still “mock up” tweets on shirts, but not purchase them.

Moving forward, our goal is to continue to allow people to create shirts, and then give them ways to request permission from the author to have it go for sale. No unapproved shirts will be able to be sold.

Thank you again for everyone’s feedback, this continues to be a very interesting discussion and we apprecaite everyone’s insight.

While we sort this out, we’ve begun removing tweets from our catalog and adding user accounts to a blacklist at the request of the content owners. You can request that by sending an @ message or direct message to the @choicetweets account on twitter.

First off, we apologize for any distress we caused anyone. We humbly admit to our fault of having made a mis-step in our thoughts of how our utility would be used. We never meant to be abusive of user’s content. We’re interested in content mashups, social interactions, and our medium: t-shirts. We thought the idea was fun. We didn’t think of it as pillaging your content, and clearly, that was a mistake. For that, we sincerely say we’re sorry.

At this point, there appear to be a few different camps:

• people who like the idea but are upset about the copyright abuse
• people who like the idea and don’t feel like they are being infringed upon
• people who hate the idea because they think it is lame
• people who hate the site because the principal of infringing copyright
• people who don’t know what being infringed feels like, so they continue going about their day.

We’re curious, which are you? We still think our idea has a chance, but we know we need to go about it in a new way. Our interest of extended content off the screen and into the real world still exists, and enough people think the idea is compelling for us to stand by it. But we want to do right by the content owners.

Another question we have is, are you upset that:

• your material is printed on a shirt
• we’re profiting
• we’re profiting and you are not

We don’t want to make the mistake of jumping to conclusion of what people are actually upset about, so we need to hear from you.

The namecalling on the user feedback forum suggests that we “die”, and”F*%k off”. Clearly, we’re not planning on doing either of those things. Instead, we want to be thoughtful about this issue, so we’d appreciate it if you were too.

The next series of posts, we hope, will help distill the real issue with the site and help us decide our next direction. In the mean time, we believe that the biggest concern is that we’re making profit from your content. While we’re still fielding takedowns, but while this conversation is going on, we’re going to take 100% of the profit and donate it to the EFF. We realize that we’ve inadvertently stirred a very interesting issue regarding copyright infringement feel that the EFF is be the most appropriate resource to support with profit generated by selling our shirts.

We sincerely believe that there is a silver lining to this cloud, and that is a valuable discussion to be having together. We look forward to resolution through discussion with all of you.

If you jump to minute 2:15 in this video, you’ll see a featurette of ChoiceTweets. Is your Spanish about as good as mine (which isn’t very good)? Check out the translation from our friend Dani Diaz below.

Translation via Dani Diaz:

“If you know any dignify tweets, you can now dress yourself with it. In ChoiceTweets.com, you can pick your preferred tweet, stamp it in a shirt and go on about life. Isn’t it amazing to what point tweeter is invading our lives…cool”.

Ok, so the translation breaks down a little bit in the literal sense, but thanks Mobuzz.tv for covering us!

We want to keep the homepage fresh with the best tweet-powered shirts, so we’re looking for your opinions.

Link us to your favorite tweeshirts from the new shirt timeline, either here in the comments or by sending us a message on twitter.

So far, a couple of the favorites we’re considering are:

• http://choicetweets.com/mrlady/statuses/918094490
• http://choicetweets.com/hotdogsladies/statuses/895847252
  (removed at author’s request)

What’s yours?

Have you read my launch announcement yet? If not, check it out, it gives a whole lot of insight into why we built ChoiceTweets and where we think it’s going.

In the next week, we’re going to be reaching out to bloggers and writers from two primary sectors: the technology/social media community, as well as the t-shirt community. Both of the are full of great content creators, and we look forward to hearing more about what people have to say.

We’re going to have some incentives for the bloggers AND their readers, so if you’re interested in writing about ChoiceTweets, just drop us a line.