I realize I’m a little late to the party, but nevertheless with all the hullaballoo around TwitterGate finally settling down, I decided to write my thoughts on why the exposure of Twitter’s inside information is good for the web.
The truth of the matter is that while a handful of interesting documents were published, no one was harmed during the revelation of Twitter’s internal memos. No names were published, no job interviewees were published: nothing that would kill the company was published. For the most part it was a victimless crime. Twitter was a little embarrassed, but Twitter is quite the resilient “little” company and will bounce back. As far as internal negotiations are concerned, Twitter is the hottest property on the web right now. Any potential partners who were offended will stick around and still try to strike a deal, or they’ll move on and the next eager establishment on the list will happily take the offended party’s place. I’m not going to debate the ethics of TechCrunch publishing Twitter’s documents, but I do feel that overall TechCrunch was a lot more selective about what they published than they needed to be.
While I don’t condone the hacking of Twitter’s internal documents, you have to wonder how they could let this happen to themselves twice in the last couple months. The first time Twitter was hacked should have been a learning experience. The second time is Twitter’s fault as there was really no excuse for them to let their guard down a second time. This event was a serious wakeup call for Twitter, and it seems as if they finally were forced to learn a very public lesson—again. Since then, they’ve implemented more stringent privacy policies as they should have done back in May. Twittergate also brought to the forefront a vulnerability in Google Docs and the entire Google email system. More public knowledge and conversation about security can only be good in the long run.
This was not just a wakeup call for Twitter, but for every web startup and web savvy individual in general. This made anyone with an online account think about the security of their own account(s), and fostered conversation about security. It also forced Google to encourage users to make sure their secondary email address was current and up to date. The general consensus of many of the comments on TechCrunch and the web in general shows that Twittergate allowed individuals to remove their rose colored glasses and take a good look at how negligence breeds embarrassment and blind attacks. I can personally say that I’ve changed passwords on all of my web related accounts and have begun to lie on my security questions. Mother’s maiden name? Can’t find my lie on Google.
It can be concluded that Twitter’s public embarrassment has made the web safer for those who choose to learn lessons from Twittergate. If you didn’t learn from their mistakes, chances are you will repeat them.
