To Witter: The fake Twitter that’s just asking for trouble

Imagine you wanted to set up your own micro blogging service. You’d want to give it a good name; how about Twitter? Oh, it’s already taken?

That hasn’t stopped one enterprising Malaysian fellow from registering the domain twitter.my and setting up a service with the name ‘To Witter‘.

As a service it’s certainly well featured; offering a public timeline as well as a ‘Groups’ function for microblogging around common interests.

It’s all open source and the site’s developer’s intentions appear to be highly honourable. He notes on the FAQ: “The goal here is autonomy — you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don’t like how twitter.my works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).”

The current userbase appears to amount to double digits. That’s probably a good thing as it certainly isn’t ready for prime time. When I tried to sign up for an account I got a database error.

To Witter isn’t the only open source mircoblogging service but it’s certainly the one most likely to fail – why, why why did the developer think it was a good idea to use the domain twitter.my? It’s not wrong to buy a domain that uses a trademarked term, but it’s certainly against the rules to launch a rival service with the same domain name and an almost identical service name – ‘To Witter’? Really?!

We expect Twitter’s flying monkeys/lawyers will be dispatched pretty soon on this one.

Thanks to Gray, whose Facebook status tipped us off.