Don't Drink and Tweet: Interesting recent tales involving Twitter
Describe this wine in 140 characters.
Facebook is developing a mobile phone with INQ. Research in Motion is getting ready to launch a tablet. And Twitter? Well, they're just making wines.
Sounds ludicrous, but it's true, sort of. In partnership with winemaking team Crushpad, Twitter will have its own brand of wines, a California vineyard vintage.
You must be thinking: damn, they're really desperate for monetization! But, truth be told, this won't profit them a cent. Wine-selling revenue will actually go to Room to Read, a non-profit organization offering literacy and educational opportunities to children, in this case promoting literacy in India.
Impressively, i's more than Twitter branding itself on a bottle: "Twitter employees have been involved in every aspect of the wine making process from harvesting to crushing to bottling," an official blog post by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone reads. "We put effort into this because we believe in the cause and because it has been a fun and rewarding experience."
Joke tweet goes very, very wrong
To his 690 followers, 27-year-old Paul Chambers sent out the follow joke tweet way back in January: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"
Fast forward some days and he is arrest by a group of officers, interrogated for several hours straight, has many personal belongings seized, and is charged and convicted.
He's now in a heated court battle, where the court is trying, with great difficulty, to decide whether Paul intended "menace" or not. They never found any bombs associated with him, and without those, it's hard to blow up an airport sky high, isn't it? This is a case of the justice body unfamiliar with social media as a private and public communications channel, and unaware of how to handle it.
Get famous quick: Quote your dad
It's always a good idea to follow a few job-board Twitter accounts and search hashtags like #jobs and #career if you're seeking employment. But how about just quoting your curse-happy father?
ShitMyDadSays, the super popular Twitter account with 1.7 million followers, has 29-year-old Justin Halpern quote his 74-year-old father, who is an eccentric—and apparently very quotable—individual.
It turned into a New York Bestseller book once he accumulated enough material, and most recently, it's now a medicore new television comedy starring William Shatner.
I'm sure some wise man once said, "Fame and wealth come to those who publicize their father's ridiculousness." Maybe not, but there's a first for everything.
