You mean you want the same Facebook, that has watched a hacker push the Koobface virus turning thousands of computers into “zombie” bots rendering them useless to their unsuspecting owners, to be an adviser to Twitter?

Facebook fell down in a big way in dealing with this extremely brutal virus. The warnings and the so called “fixes” fell woefully short.

As for Twitter’s Biz Stone being arrogant, I can’t speak to that point. It may be true and it may not be true. This much I do understand. If an entrepreneur creates one of the most vital tools in Social Media history, to date, it is not easy to sell that invention. No matter what the price, if you have a personal stake you want to move your “project” forward.

In my opinion, $500m is far short of Twitter’s potential value in the market.

Finally I agree that Twitter should have and could have done more to warn people of the phishing problem(s).

In my opinion if they need to fix anything it would be to create a more vibrant internal search engine.

Sarah,

Thank you for these superb comments. I, myself, keep comparing Twitter with any online responsible news or information resource, seeking a measure of responsible leadership behavior. Maybe I have simply looked too high, which is sometimes the case among visionary founders.

David

Thank you for your reply. Your blog post, together with all the other ones I’ve been reading over the past few days, has encouraged me to devote the today’s post in my blog to the topic of preparedness of crisis.

BTW, I am also based in the DC area. It’d been good to meet for a coffee one day.

Geno

There is a responsibility for programmers to respond to user alerts and requests to block spam accounts, fix security leaks and update us on this progress. But I find that more people follow @kevinrose or @chrisbrogan than @twitter, and news is spread faster from these sources. Also, it is our community – we should be the ones alerting others of the possibility of phishing. I think Twitter should be held accountable as a tool – if we can utilize Twitter staff to help end a problem in our community then Twitter is doing its job.

Bad example, David, Steve Jobs is so quixotic that it’s difficult to say how he would behave. Most would probably say “badly”, based on his recent behavior. He’s even abandoned Macworld, for goodness sake, and he also leaves everyone wondering now what the heck is going on health-wise, but unlike Castro, he’s got a bunch of investors with money riding on this.

Also, Twitter is not Union Carbide, and the phishing stunt that the jerk-off (through NO fault of Twitter) pulled today was just that, a “stunt”, relatively harmless, and not a lethal airborne toxic event that killed thousands, so does Twitter really need such advanced “crisis management”? I don’t think so…

Anyway, I still think all this criticism is too harsh. After all, Twitter is a free micro-blogging platform already well-known for its quirkiness because of the technical problems involved with scaling to the level of messages it handles daily. Twitter has been dealing with this problem admirably, if you understand the underlying weaknesses of the original software (you can Google for articles about this).

I even think it would have been quite weird and inappropriate for Twitter management to make a bigger deal out of this, since it was nothing that they could predict, control, or even fix. It’s simply NOT a Twitter problem. And they DID warn people, and right where everyone can see the warning, in red below the text input box directly on the site.

So maybe give the guys a break and criticize the real culprit, the jerk-off who is responsible for the actual phishing stunt?

Geno,

Appreciate you taking the time to comment and really like your blog, http://www.amnavigator.com/blog/.

If Twitter’s management had any blush of a crisis plan (which I doubt), it failed at staying ahead of the crisis. The company should be out in front of the discussion at this moment. It’s not a time to hunker down and hope it will go away because only openness and transparency in leadership will help now to rebuild Twitter’s reputation.

David

The genius of Twitter is in its simplicity and eloquence. However, when a complex problem (crisis) hits home, it should be treated in a more thought-through way. Did they have a crisis preparedness plan at all?

David,

Just let me add that you are correct … we have both handled situations like this and, you are correct, unquestionably could turn a problem into praise and applause for Twitter’s management within hours.

David

Let me just say that I love Twitter. But an issue like this illustrates that the company’s management, while brilliant with dreaming up online technology, are novices with handling crisis communications. A tiny warning box on the site is not enough.

Twitter could get past this, and achieve applause and outstanding media coverage were they simply to be more enlightened about handling such challenges.

By comparison, would Steve Jobs behave this way? Absolutely not! Neither should the CEO of Twitter.

David