Twitter Seeks Trademarks For ‘Tweetstorm’ And ‘The Future of Identity’

Twitter wants control over "Tweetstorm." The social networking service has filed a trademark application to claim official rights over the use of the term, which describes a flurry of tweets made in quick succession on a single topic or thought.

Kanye West recently used it to defend his prophetic fashion sense amid criticism of his most recent clothing line, and outspoken investor Mark Cuban dished out health advice -- both without feeling constrained by the site’s strict 140 character limit. The practice was first perfected by Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, who has employed it often to comment on topics like Bitcoin, the sharing economy and the evolution of the Internet:

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and chairman of Twitter, launched his first tweetstorm earlier this year in support of the practice itself. He called it “a clever way around the 140 character constraint.” The tech giant seems to have also realized that allowing the popular term to remain unprotected under trademark law is unwise.

Twitter has recently filed other trademark applications that offer an enticing look into the social media company's possible future plans and products – including one for “The Future of Identity,” which is the name for a suite of tools that may enable users to log in to more websites through their Twitter account, as Fortune reports. Twitter also laid claim to a simple icon meant to represent a new “public forum” for real-time news and information through streaming audio or video, according to VentureBeat.