SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The Federal Trade Commission is reviewing social networking company Twitter and its dealings with at least one company that makes software designed to interact with the service, according to media reports.
The review is being led by the FTC's antitrust division, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal citing an anonymous source. The report described the FTC's review as "narrow" and having no impact on Twitter's advertising business.
UberMedia, which owns several software applications that make use of Twitter data and has had a rocky relationship with Twitter, said it has been contacted by the FTC.
"We intend to fully comply with their request for information," UberMedia said in an emailed statement to Reuters. A spokeswoman declined to provide more details about the nature of the FTC's interest.
Representatives from Twitter and the FTC declined to comment.
Twitter, which allows people to send 140-character text messages, or Tweets, to groups of so-called followers, is one of the Web's most popular social networking services, along with Facebook and Zynga.
On Thursday, Twitter said that its users now send 200 million Tweets every day on the service, up from 65 million Tweets a year ago.
As Twitter has built new features for the service -- such as a photo-sharing tool and special versions of the site for smartphones -- its relationship has grown strained with some of the third-party developers who traditionally developed many such tools.
In February, Twitter temporarily blocked several UberMedia applications from accessing Twitter data citing violations of its terms of service. And in May Twitter acquired TweetDeck, a third-party application for using social networking services which had been in acquisition talks with UberMedia.
The blog Business Insider was first to report the story and said that the FTC is "actively investigating" Twitter and the way it deals with the companies that build applications that use Twitter data.
(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic with additional reporting by Diane Bartz; editing by Carol Bishopric)
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