Representative John Culberson, the Twittering and Qik’ing Congressman from my good old home town of Houston, Texas, has been on a rampage this morning about a proposed new regulation for the House of Representatives, which, he claims, will require all world wide web communications from the House floor from those in congress to receive “prior approval” from a Democratically-controlled Committee on House Administration before it goes out to the web. From the letter:

“

• Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;
• To the maximum extent possible, the official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House’s content guidelines.
• Any link from a House website to an external site on which the Member video is hosted must contain an exit notice.
• CHA, the Office of Web Assistance(OWA), or other designated House entity should maintain a list of external sites that meet whatever requirements are established by the CHA

”

Per the above proposed recommendations, this would rule out any Twitter communication because by law, each Tweet would need to be prepended by a disclaimer, identifying it as being produced by a House office for official purposes and, as Culberson puts it, that will most likely in and of its self exceed 140 characters. Also, it would mean that any Congressman wishing to use a site such as Twitter to share publicly what is going on in Congress with their constituents will have to get prior approval, censorship essentially, before using such a site or technology.

I find it ironic that it is a Republican that is trying to show the Democrats how to use technology on this, but Representative Culberson has a point here, and we need to speak up if we’re to continue seeing social media propagate through our government. Social Media in government means a more open government, and that’s a good thing! I’d like to encourage all that read this to write your Congressman or Congresswoman about this (Pelosi is part of this!) and get them to see things straight rather than requiring censorship of our House floor.

You can read the Proposal here. (Which, were this proposal to take effect, I believe I would be breaking the law by sharing with you)

UPDATE: Want to discuss? Let’s discuss in a nice open format right below this post via the FriendFeed link below!

On the heels of a post this morning by Biz Stone, it appears Twitter is beginning to bring the rate limit for posts through the Twitter API back to the 70 per hour it used to be. For the last several months, Twitter has brought that limit down to only 20 requests per hour. Per the Twitter developers mailing list just now, Twitter has now raised that limit to 40, and will gradually be raising it back up to 70 in the upcoming week.

This is welcome news in the week of months of API and service outages. What this means is that you, as the user will no longer see the “Rate Limit Exceeded” error you may be seeing through clients like Twhirl. In regards to the API this leaves mainly just the XMPP stream that they need to re-enable for developers - this may not be happening any time soon however, as Twitter may be looking to only enable a select few developers access to the stream.

Has this request limit affected you as a developer? How about as a user?

Those of you in the Facebook Group or Google group have already received notice about this but I just realized I hadn’t blogged about it yet. Tomorrow we have a great Facebook Developers Garage planned here in Salt Lake City. Facebook has sent us a professional copy of the DVD of the Palo Alto Facebook Developers Garage that I was able to attend in May, so we’re going to watch that, and then go over some of the new changes that are coming into play for the new Facebook design.

This should be a great event if your a developer or even non-techie, as it will help you see some of the integration points you can build into with the new design. A lot will be changing with the new Facebook design, so if you are currently, or are planning to build a Facebook application, either as a developer or in a marketing or business position, you’ll definitely want to attend. This is a completely open event so please invite your friends! All I ask is that you RSVP here.

We are still looking for someone that can provide food for the event so if your company would like some great exposure in front of possibly 20-30 developers and Facebook-interested people, please contact me! In the meantime, the event will be hosted at EPIC Ventures in downtown Salt Lake City and they will be providing snacks and drinks for all that attend. I’d like to thank them personally for hosting the event - they are doing this after hosting our food for last month’s event!

All in all, this should be a fun event as all of them are. If for some reason you can’t attend, our next meeting will be September 9th from 7pm to 10pm so put that on your calendar! I’ll look forward to seeing you all there!

Here’s a map to EPIC Ventures - it has been recommended that you park in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building parking lot across the street. I’m told they can provide vouchers for that. Also, if you arrive late a phone number will be posted on the door of the Zions building for Rachel Strate - please call that number and we’ll let you in!:

Epic Ventures
One South Main St, 8th floor
Salt Lake City, UT 84111