Twitter shut down the service the day after Matt Taibbi sent the inaugural Thunderclap, a tweet replicated by almost 2,000 supporters after a Kickstarter-esque campaign. "Weird, they suspended our OAuth token just now," Hashem Bajwa, founder of De-De, which makes Thunderclap, wrote in an email. "We figured they might. We're trying to reach people there."

Thunderclap lost access shortly after the second Thunderclap, a call on Congress to publish government data in bulk. It was tweeted by 128 people at noon simultaneously.

Tell Congress to provide simple access to congressional data. Innovation in government depends on it! #freeTHOMAS thndr.it/KTGbz8

— Thunderclap (@ThunderclapIt) June 7, 2012

It's likely that Twitter decided that Thunderclap was too close to being spam. Some Betabeat commenters would agree—"The article makes it sound noble, but the Thunderclap recipients are just inundated with junk," wrote one. Thunderclap bears some resemblance to FAME, a game that also got yanked by Twitter for triggering mass numbers of users to follow and unfollow each other in order to give one person a celebrity-level number of followers for a day.

Thunderclap had been contacted by a number of celebrities in the media and politics scene about potential Thunderclap campaigns, Mr. Bajwa told Betabeat in confidence. In a follow-up email, he mentioned that the White House had also been in touch.

"They gave us an automated reply that we are violating terms of service by sending multiple @mentions and automating sending tweets," he said. "A lot of services like Buffer automate. We are trying to contact some of the executives at Twitter now. Hope we can resolve it." Long term, Thunderclap was planning to include other social media sites, with a launch on Facebook planned in two weeks. Maybe Thunderclap can take its service to Weibo, the popular Chinese version of Twitter—then again, maybe not.

Mr. Ludwin (Twitter)

The Twitter game Fame launched just a few weeks ago, but it appears the game's 15 minutes of fame are already up. In a tweet sent yesterday, the team announced that Twitter planned to shut down the game because it violates its Terms of Service agreement.

As we reported in March, the Fame game gave us all a chance to feel like Lady Gaga for a day. Sign up to play, and you're immediately entered into a lottery with a new winner daily. When your name is drawn, all Fame players automatically follow you, and you get a chance to prove why they should continue to follow you once your turn is over. But no longer--apparently the game violated the "spirit" of Twitter's Terms of Service.

"It was always a question mark about what Twitter would do," RRE Ventures principal and Fame cofounder Adam Ludwin told Betabeat via phone. "I have a lot of respect for the guys at Twitter and they gave us an extension, they gave us ideas about ways to change the app to conform more with what they viewed as in line with the spirit of their terms."

Though they did not find Twitter's request at all unreasonable, the Fame team decided that the solutions Twitter offered would have changed the nature of the game so fundamentally that they'd rather not have the game on Twitter at all, he said.

"When we developed Fame we read the Terms of Service very carefully and came to the conclusion that we weren't violating specific rules," said Mr. Ludwin. "Twitter did highlight rules they thought we were violating. [They believe] users of Twitter need to make their own decisions about who to follow. Our argument was that by playing Fame, users are opting in and signifying their intent to follow--not a specific person, but they’re deciding, yeah we want to follow that person. We tried to resolve it with them and we couldn't. It was essentially a disagreement over the spirit of those terms."

Mr. Ludwin thinks that this issue highlights what is going to continue to be a growing tension between platforms and developers. "As platforms gain more and more scale, devs are going to find that they will butt heads with those platforms," he said.

For the Fame team, the game was always more of a social experiment than anything. "We learned a lot and we got a lot out of it," said Mr. Ludwin. "It was great that they let us go for 19 days, but at the end we just didn’t see eye to eye."

But Fame fans, don't get too upset: Mr. Ludwin assured us that the team is looking to launch the game on other platforms, so your 15 minutes might not be up just yet.

(youtube.com)

It's the sad truth of the Internet: you can tweet and blog your sweet little heart out, but there's no guarantee that anyone is actually listening. But what if there was a platform that gave you the chance to deliver whatever thoughts, feelings or advice you had, right to the intimate confines of someone's inbox? And they actually voluntarily signed up for the chance to hear you?

It's not a newsletter or a shared-interest listserv: it's a new project out of NYU's ITP masters program called The Listserve that gives the chance for one person each day to share their thoughts with thousands through a random lottery email system. Users sign up to receive one email daily from a randomly selected user. The email can be about anything--from what they had for breakfast that morning, to a picture of a kitten, to a politically-motivated diatribe--and it's sent, either publicly or anonymously, out to the other Listserve subscribers.

The project was incubated in an NYU masters class run by Internet scholar Clay Shirky entitled "Designing Conversational Spaces." Listserve's tagline? "If you had the chance to speak to one million people, what would you say?"

"The basic idea that it comes from is to see what people do when given a spotlight," Josh Begley, a Listserve group member, told Betabeat via phone. "I’ve long been curious about that idea. You know, even on Facebook when you see a bunch of friends having this perception that a lot of people are listening, sometimes we end up doing crazy, heartfelt or surprising things. So we're just trying to create a scenario in which that can happen in a low budget way."

Alvin Chang, another Listserve member, explained it further. "How do we play with it to the point where we can find something out about how people are having conversations and how people are viewing things in context based on not only design choices, but contextual spaces?"

For those of you who took journalism classes, Mr. Chang is essentially applying famed journalism scholar Marshall McLuhan's popular phrase, "The medium is the message," to this experiment.

The group argues that what differentiates the project from other large-scale email lists is that it's not organized around a specific theme or topic. It simply exists to allow people to share and listen to what others have to say, regardless of their interests, location or physicality.

"The obstacle that most people have now is that they are in silos, they talk to people of like-mindendess," said Greg Dorsainville, another team member. "When I thought of the use cases of getting an email from someone you don’t know and you don't know the topic it will be about, it’s an antithesis to that type of behavior."

To protect anonymity, the user who is randomly picked to send out the list-wide email can choose to have it sent either from their email address, or by the Listserve team, and each email will be vetted before being sent, to avoid users sending out hardcore porn or computer viruses. "We just want to make sure that some 12-year-old who happens to sign up for the list doesn’t get porn," said Mr. Chang.

Listserve is staged to be a social experiment. The group members say they want to see what gets people to communicate, and how their messages change depending on the size of the audience and the medium used to convey their message.

"I want it to be understood that this is as earnest as it sounds," said Mr. Dorsainville. "We would like to take out this notion of communication having to be about something else behind it, like how Facebook gives you a platform because they want you to bare your data. That’s not what we want to do. We want to share your stories and your feelings and your opinions."

Very earnest, indeed.

It's worth noting that the project will only begin once it reaches 10,000 subscribers. Until then, perhaps playing the Fame game can satisfy your desire to be heard.

Mr. Ludwin. (Twitter)

Adam Ludwin, a two-time entrepreneur and now a principal at RRE Ventures, is a fame monster, in that he's looking for Lady Gaga-level fame. But he wants to share it with you, too. The affable Mr. Ludwin, along with Big Human developers Rus Yusupov and Dominik Hofmann, created a Twitter-based fame game that we predict will soon have all your followers spamming your timeline for invites.

Fame, the game, is brilliant in its simplicity. The goal is to make everyone as Twitter famous as Lady Gaga, for a day. This is accomplished via a mass follower agreement: sign up to play, and you're entered into a lottery that selects a new winner every day. On the day you win, everyone else playing will automatically follow you for 24 hours. Right now that's a 976-follower boost and a chance to convince everyone to keep you. Long Island Radio deejay Astra, today's winner, saw her follower count go from 5,000 to 5,172.

The scheme reminds us of the spamsters who would create follower rings in earlier days of Twitter. You'd join the group, which sometimes cost a fee, and you'd automatically be followed by everyone else for instant social juice.

The app was Mr. Ludwin's idea. He coded in high school and college, but turned over the development to Big Human because "I'm way too rusty now to build something fast or scalable enough, plus I have a day job."

Fame took a month to build, Mr. Ludwin said, and launched at noon today. Between a Business Insider pickup and a viral marketing twist, we suspect it will soon have many more players. You can tweet a link and get ten entries for the lottery and five entries for every person who tweets your link—who could resist?

Now that the former entrepreneur has had a taste of viral growth, we're wondering how long it'll be before Mr. Ludwin is seduced by the allure of Startupland. "I enjoy helping others start companies more than anything else," he wrote in an email. And what will he do if he wins? "Plug my favorite companies of course!"