October 27, 2009
Football player suspended for Twitter comment
Facing reality of site's public nature too late, running back Larry Johnson apologizes for gay slur
The Kansas City Chiefs running back Larry Johnson has been suspended by the team for "conduct detrimental to the club," according to a team statement on Wednesday.
An emotional exchange on Twitter took place on Monday between Johnson and a Twitter follower, following the San Diego Chargers' 37-7 victory over the Chiefs on Sunday. First, Johnson said some unkind things about the Chiefs coach. A fan heckled him, and Johnson retaliated with multiple tweets, one containing the derogatory slur, "think bout a clever diss then that wit your fag pic."
As a result of the suspension, Johnson will be missing one game, which amounts to a net loss of $213,000 for the unfortunate tweeter. Johnson is appealing the suspension and released the following statement:
"I want to apologize to the fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and the rest of the NFL, Commissioner (Roger) Goodell, the Chiefs organization, coach Todd Haley, his staff, and my team mates for the words I used yesterday."
"I regret my actions. The words were used by me in frustration, and they were not appropriate. I did not intend to offend anyone, but that is no excuse for what I said."
Of course, this wouldn't be nearly the first example of friction occurring on Twitter between the general public and well-known stars, be they athletes, musicians, or politicians. In the music industry, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails hit headlines for making a big deal about quitting Twitter over the summer, after a group of followers continued to make racist comments about his girlfriend at the time. At this point, he's sort of infamous for repeatedly "quitting" and retweeting, "quitting" and retweeting, evidence of his desire to embrace social media coupled with awareness of the complexities involved for someone well-known.
Also over the summer, Antonio Cromartie of the San Diego Chargers was fined $2,500 for tweeting about the poor quality of the team's food.
Some might try to argue for Johnson using the defense that not everyone understands how Twitter is a public space and that it will be treated as such. But who will believe that? The truth is that just as people let their fired-up emotions get the better of them in everyday life, so too will regrettable outbursts occur on social sites. We may as well get used to it.
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What is Twitter?
Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Where did the idea for Twitter come from?
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
How is Twitter built?
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
How do you make money from Twitter?
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
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