Contentinople - Erin Barker - News Bits: Twitter Fights Back

Written by Erin Barker

Friday, July 17. 2009 at 10:50 AM EDT Post a comment

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TechCrunch began publishing documents stolen from Twitter by a hacker this week, claiming they got the "green light" from Twitter Inc. Not so, say the Twitter founders.

In an embarrassment similar to having your seventh-grade diary read aloud to the whole school, the stolen documents have revealed Twitter's possible plans for an IPO, swipes at Facebook, outlandish forecasts, and even a burn on P. Diddy ("Diddy values his contribution higher than we do").

"It's important to note that we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information - They aren't happy about it, but they are able to live with it, they say," TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld wrote yesterday, before revealing the documents.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams reacted via Twitter [ed. note: how else?] and co-founder Biz Stone reacted in a post on the Twitter blog, saying, "The publication of stolen documents is irresponsible and we absolutely did not give permission for these documents to be shared."

If Twitter decides to sue TechCrunch, as they have hinted they might, it's uncertain whether they'd have any success, as this type of legal situation is fairly untested and TechCrunch could be protected by the First Amendment.

In other news:

In his blog post, Twitter co-founder Stone also defended Twitter's lax protection of the stolen documents, saying, "If you've ever used the same password on more than one service, you've made the same mistake that lead to this theft -- it's a web wide issue." [Ed. note: Funny how he didn't mention that the password in question was password.]

Rumors are flying around that Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) are once again in serious talks for a search and online advertising deal. According to BoomTown's Kara Swisher, top Microsoft execs flew down to Silicon Valley to visit Yahoo yesterday. Don't break our hearts again, Microhoo.

The recession is finally affecting the gaming industry: U.S. sales of video games, consoles, and hardware peripherals fell by 31 percent in June, the greatest year-over-year monthly decline since September 2000. Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's DS were the only two systems that received sales increases.

Tags: Business, Gaming, Legal, Microsoft, Nintendo Wii, Search, Twitter, Yahoo

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