Hacker’s bounty offers an inside glimpse of Twitter
If you have the slightest interest in micro-blogging site Twitter, you might want to spend a bit of time over at TechCrunch.
An alleged hacker sent the Web site several hundred documents earlier this week, claiming they had been pilfered from Twitter’s internal servers, email accounts of executives, etc.
TechCrunch is now running some - though certainly not all - of those confidential documents, including revenue projections and plans for the future. The site, which has been in heavy talks with Twitter attorneys, says it is holding back lots of sensitive data, including documents that name job applicants, credit card numbers and other confidential information.
Still, the folks at Twitter can’t be too happy to see their internal documents laid out for the world to see. (Perhaps there’s a lesson here about the need for better security.)
Among the documents that are being disclosed is one that deals with financial forecasts and it’s presented with the qualifier that this was a rough estimate.
The most interesting data point - As of February, Twitter expected their first revenue to come in Q3 2009 (which is now). A modest $400,000 was expected, followed by a more robust $4 million in Q4. The document also shows Twitter’s projected user growth (25 million by the end of 2009), which it has absolutely blown through already. By the end of 2010, Twitter expected to be at a $140 million revenue run rate.
As of February the company had $45 million in the bank (they’d raised $55 million at that time). And they expected the cost of each Twitter user to the company to be just over $1/year.
Tim has covered a wide range of topics, including tourism, crime, aviation and gambling, since becoming a reporter in 1990. The Oklahoma native joined the Post-Dispatch in 2007 after spending nine years in Orlando. In his spare time, he's often exploring one virtual world or another. He can be reached at tbarker@post-dispatch.com. 
Do you think that outlets like TechCrunch and your own blog encourage hacker behavior when they post this information? Do journalistic ethics apply when the information was known to be gathered by illegal means? On the other hand, it could be seen as warning on locking down one’s servers.