Hashtagfight in the twitterverse #svpt vs #swtw

This morning Pelle Wessman a.k.a Voxpelli on twitter, a web developer at Good Old in Malmö spotted tweets about a new hashtag-website that looked a lot like his. Voxpelli & peterrosdahl built svpt.nu that follows the hashtag #svpt (svenskar på twitter = Swedes on twitter) a friday night when they had the flu and nothing better to do, and now tweeter.se does the exact same thing, but following the hashtag #swtw (presumably "swedes on twitter").

Ensina on twitter is the man behind tweeter.se and he is by his own account following some bad legal advice "we haven't broken any laws - we follow American laws, not European (according to legal council)" - ah, but you have - and we saw you do it too. Because if you compare the source code, line by line, it's nearly identical.

I phoned Voxpelli and asked him about this site: "I had no idea about the place until Jardenberg tweeted me about it. I had nothing to do with it." he says and when I bring up that they have no copyright notice on their svpt.nu page he says "as far as I know, that's not a legal requirement and hasn't been for a long time. Like since the eighties. ....when that guy was born?" This is correct - a copyright notice hasn't been required since April 1, 1989 in the states.

After many tweets from lots of #svpt all pointing out the non-kosher handling of code directly to Ensina and giving him correct information on copyright in the USA he has tried to pour oil on the waves by adding "after a concept by svpt.nu" but since that didn't help at all, only adding to the confusion on who created the site and whether Voxpelli had approved this incarnation, Ensina has now tweeted "we will take it down around 17:00 hrs today". Tweeter.se has died, long live the hashtag #svpt.nu.

Update someone with too much time on their hands has created thingshitlerdid, a.k.a Joe Ripoff twitter account and keeps tweeting messages to ensina and hastag #swtw. Real mature.

Update #2 Thank you @hugowett for saving the source code comparison here so that we can still compare the two sites after tweeter.se is gone.