If you're a player at the US Open, you can do many things.

You can grunt, groan, call for a challenge, take an injury time-out at the most suspicious of times, you can pout, moan and generally carry on as so many do in tennis, but you cannot tweet.

No sir, you most definitely cannot tweet.

Plastered all over the corridors of the National Tennis Centre in New York as the US Open got underway on Monday were signs from the Tennis Integrity Unit that players cannot post Twitter messages during the tournament because of fears they could violate anti-corruption laws.

Andy Roddick, one of the more prominent tennis tweeters has already called the rule "lame" and others will doubtless have their say as the tournament unfolds. Count Serena Williams as one most likely to have something to say.

It is a tough call for tennis administrators to make. On the one hand, the sport appears to have been increasingly targeted by big-time punters and there have been questions asked of a handful of results from matches in the last few years. A player tweeting about an injury or what they may have heard in the locker room could prove invaluable for hard-core punters.

But on the other, tennis is a sport in doldrums. It gets only a few weeks of the year in the headlines and the US Open is one of those times when the sport is supposed to cash in, particularly in the US, the media capital of the universe. Having the likes of Serena Williams and Roddick tweeting, if not at changes of end, but certainly between matches, will surely only help create interest in the sport.

Once the US Open is done and dusted, it is the Australian Open that is on the clock, at least as far as Grand Slam events are concerned and while we doubt Tennis Australia president Geoff Pollard cares much for Twitter, we're sure tournament director Craig Tiley will have clearer views on the matter and we expect to hear more about it when the tournament launch takes place, usually the week after the AFL Grand Final.

Meanwhile, the NFL has released its social media policy ahead of the start of its new season late next week.

NFL players may not post to Facebook and/or Twitter from 90 minutes before the start of a match until after post-match media commitments have been completed.

This smacks of too much commonsense to come from a sporting league. It allows the players to promote themselves without detracting from the event at hand - the matches - and also protects the rights of media or some of whom pay more than a billion dollars for the privilege.