Last Thursday, TechCrunch posted a multitude of proprietary information belonging to Twitter. Some 300 confidential documents arrived in the tech blog’s inbox the prior Tuesday, from someone known as “Hacker Croll.”
The documents include employment agreements, calendars of the founders, new employee interview schedules, phone logs and bills, alarm settings, a financial forecast, a pitch for a Twitter TV show, confidentiality agreements with companies such as AOL, Dell, Ericsson, and Nokia, a list of employee dietary restrictions, credit card numbers, Paypal and Gmail screen shots, and much more.
TechCrunch published some of the documents, though they first filtered through them and withheld some that they felt they shouldn’t publish.
Twitter, suffice to say, isn’t too pleased about TechCrunch’s decision to publish said material, much of which is critical to their plans to grow and monetize their business. The microblogging giant is considering filing a lawsuit.
It is my opinion that TechCrunch should not have posted the documents. They were were never meant to be made public, they were obtained by illegal means, and they don’t reveal some sort of internal Twitter scandal or anything. The only thing achieved by publishing the documents is Twitter’s business plan is now publicly available to any company wishing to compete against them.
