Twitter has tripped up one of its top executives. Chief financial officer Anthony Noto yesterday publicly tweeted about a plan he has to buy a company, including how he wanted to help make the deal happen at a meeting in mid- December. The message was posted on the microblogging service before it was deleted, with Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser confirming that Noto was trying to send the message privately.
“I still think we should buy them,” Noto tweeted. “He is on your schedule for Dec 15 or 16 -- we will need to sell him. I have a plan.”
It’s unclear who Noto was trying to send a message to or which company he’s interested in purchasing. Prosser declined to comment further.
The incident shows that even top members of Twitter’s executive team, who are on a mission to better explain the company’s product potential to Wall Street, sometimes have trouble using the service.
The slip-up is so common that it has a name -- a “DM fail,” for “direct message fail.” Such DM fails have happened on a relatively regular basis.
In a high-profile Silicon Valley DM fail in 2010, startup investor Dave McClure mistakenly publicly tweeted that another Silicon Valley investor, Ron Conway, was throwing him under the bus over allegations that he was working with others to control the market for financing startups.
Bloomberg
