TimesOnline Reports
Documents leaked by a hacker on future plans of the fashionable social networking site Twitter, has sent it all a flutter.
The microblogging site apparently has projected revenue of $140 million by the end of 2010 as part of a massive expansion which will see its user numbers grow to one billion within four years.
For a service that exists to allow people to live their life in the open, Twitter has responded to the leak with uncharacteristic coyness.
Biz Stone, the company’s co-founder, said in an official Twitter blog posting. “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.”
Although dated February, the leaked information, which has now been widely circulated on the internet, provides a tantalising glimpse into the ambitions of Twitter, which has more than 25 million users.
The episode raises serious questions about the security of personal identities and sensitive corporate information in the digital age, where data are only as safe as the weakest password of a company’s least security conscious employee.
According to TechCrunch, the leading techie blog, which says it was sent the Twitter information by a hacker, the company expected its first revenue to be a modest $400,000, in the third quarter of this year, followed by a more robust $4 million in Q4 and $140 million by the end of next year.
By the end of 2013, Twitter hoped to have signed up 1 billion users, post $1.54 billion in revenue, employ 5,200 people and make $111 million in net earnings, the document, dated February 2009, suggests.
In addition to attracting a huge popular user following the service, which permits users to post “Tweets”, or messages, of up to 140 characters, Twitter has also captured the attention of Web giants such as Google, which has had unspecified discussions with the company, according to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
According to Twitter, a hacker calling himself Hacker Croll broke into an administrative employee’s e-mail account by guessing a password and gained access to the employee’s Google Apps account, where Twitter shares spreadsheets and documents with business ideas and financial details over the Web.
The hacker also broke into the e-mail account of the wife of Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive, and from there accessed several of Mr. Williams’ personal Internet accounts, including those at Amazon and PayPal.
It is not the fist time that Twitter has been the victim of hacking. In January an 18-year-old hacker known as GMZ, admitted hijacking high-profile Twitter accounts, including President-Elect Barack Obama’s, by guessing the password of a member of Twitter’s support staff, who’d chosen the weak password “happiness.”
It is now desperate to find a way of using the popularity of its free service, to turn itself into a money-making business. Mr Stone told Reuters earlier this year that he was interested in generating revenue from premium add-on features, such as analytic tools, rather than from traditional online advertising.
The security implications of the leak - as well as the decision of TechCrunch to publish some of the confidential information and of this paper to repeat it - are also far reaching.
As more individuals and companies opt for “cloud computing,” where documents are stored on servers accessed via the Web and where there is usually just a user name and password for protection, such security breaches are likely to continue.
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