I know a few people on Twitter, but I don’t have an account, and I don’t see the point of the whole thing — unless you are celebrity. Do I really need to know that you are going to pick up a gallon a milk? No. But if Shaq is buying groceries, then that is of great interest to me.
And now I have a more concrete argument against Twitter:
A woman living in the North Side Uptown [Chicago] neighborhood is being sued for allegedly posting on her Twitter account a “tweet” that accuses her management company of being OK with moldy apartments.
And her landlord company is “suing for damages in excess of $50,000″. That’s right, folks. You can now get your ass handed to you for your internet posts. I imagine this same legal principle applies to great blogs (TheGreatWahl.com, tell your friends about it), Facebook, MySpace, etc. She only has about 20 followers, all family and friends, but because her ‘tweets’ were set to public, anyone could see it and therefore greatly impacted the reputation of Horizon realty, according to the lawsuit.
Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.
$50K for that? It makes me wonder if I should go back and clean up some of the sarcastic humor in any of my older posts here…but I like to live dangerously.
It also begs the question of how much Horizon’s legal department thought this through. I don’t know how they became aware of the original tweet in the first place, but even if this chick shared it with her followers and they mentioned it to a couple of friends, a maximum of 50 people probably would’ve seen it. Now, by suing, they’ve made it a much bigger deal and exposed themselves to a much larger audience.
If I’m lucky enough to get a job in Chicago, maybe I would have rented an apartment operated by Horizon realty. Now, simply because they went after this women for a Twitter post, there’s probably a 1% chance I would even consider them. Good work, guys.
Via CBS Chicago: Uptown Resident Sued For Twitter Post
Good post Wahl, although I thought you’d give me credit for giving you new material to write about. Maybe I’ll tweet a link to your article and increase your readership, and then Caponiti will RT, thus increasing your loyal readers ten fold.