The Twittergate Document Leakage

A lot of discussion is going on on the net about the leak of internal Twitter documents to among others Techcrunch.

First of all I think that Michael from Techcrunch is handling it very well, both traffic wise for the blog, and ethics wise. He talked about getting the documents which lead to huge discussions about security of the cloud, ethics, passwords, and more. These were good discussions in my mind and important ones at that. But all the time he said he would not publish all of the documents and that which has been published by him up till now is really only things that in my mind he does need to publish. Especially as Scoble already pointed out, others, old school media, have already published.

I really like this bit from one of Michaels posts about why they will post some of the stuff:

> “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,” is something Lord Northcliffe, a newspaper magnate, supposedly said. I agree wholeheartedly.

And remember. This does not mean he wants to publish everything, ethics are still involved.

Interesting to see are Twitter’s financial numbers. They already blew past the user numbers they had guessed they would get, but we will see what the monetization strategy will really be for the next 6 months. Revenue should be trickling in now. I am not too worried though as they only need to make $1-$2 per User per Year to turn a profit, and that should be doable. Hell you can generate highly targeted Leads for well over a hundred USDs or clicks for easily above $1. Corporations will pay for access, … .

What I really like though is Ev’s comment on his blog post:

> Obviously, these docs are not polished or ready for prime time and they’re certainly not revealing some big, secret plan for taking over the world. As Peter Kafka put it, this is “akin to having your underwear drawer rifled: Embarrassing, but no one’s really going to be surprised about what’s in there.” That is an apt analogy.

I made me remember Ricardo Semler’s book Maverick (or Seven Day Weekend, not sure anymore) in which Ricardo goes on about the openness they are working in. For a pitch to a project they would open up their entire profit/loss calculation, balance sheet whatever because in the end he said, nobody is going to beat you because they know your projections or past numbers. They will beat you because they are better, at execution. This is really what Ev is saying. Hell, now somebody outside knows that they were planning in February to make $400.000 this quarter. Who cares. It’s not something you love being out there, but mostly because it is not a learned thing and because people will start questioning you. Above that, plans always come out differently and this might come back haunting them for an IPO, especially if their numbers are worse. But hey, they have $45 million in the bank which will last them another year at current growth rate without revenue.

The biggest lesson: Have good passwords. :)