BTW, we're using heroku and ironmq for all the backend heavy lifting. Perhaps twitter got spooked by the volume of API calls. A testament to seamless cloud scalability. And of course we soon hope to get the twitter issue addressed so we can be operational and help causes spread their word.

It's cute the way The Verge is targeting HN with their spam rewrite of Betabeat's article:

http://betabeat.com/2012/06/twitter-shuts-crowdspeaking-app-...

The Verge is a news site. You can't copyright news. It's not like my local paper says, Hey you should check out this article in the Times, it's great.

The Verge is a news site like Demand Media is Wikipedia.

Hopefully Twitter will embrace this form of user communication in the long run. Although, if someone started using their API for this purpose out of the blue I can see them shutting it down as a first course of action. Definitely try to get in contact with someone on the inside and see what changes need to be made for them to allow it.

My political junkie side loves the idea as an attempt to improve democracy. I could see it expanding into snail mail and phone (twilio).

No, Twitter shut down your spam engine.