“News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.”
— Great quote from an unlikely source: Michael Arrington paraphrasing news baron Alfred Harmsworth. What is cleverly being referred to as “Twittergate” has been the subject of much blog chatter. After the most embarrassing of security breaches (Twitter’s password was “password”), Twitter’s confidential information leaked on the web. TechCrunch scooped the breach and got its hands on copies of the files. Relying on the first amendment, precedent and an alleged “green light” from Twitter, they published the files for the world to see. Good for network security professionals, not so good for Twitter. The files contained various meeting minutes, financial projections and some insight on Twitter’s strategy to remain a private company and its relationships with Facebook (viewed as threat), GOOG (viewed as suitor), and MSFT (viewed as irrelevant). Silicon Alley Insider summarizes the findings nicely here. Twitter’s legal threats are not helping from a PR perspective. Twitter has been the darling of the press for some time now (getting a lot of free advertising as Mr. Harmsworth would note), but they are finding out what the other side looks like, and it ain’t pretty.
