Designer Tweets Egyptian Riots Due to His New Line Coming Out 142
Famous shoe designer Kenneth Cole stuck his fabulously shod foot into his mouth by tweeting, "Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online..." After an uproar from people who don't think revolution jokes are funny, he issued the following tweet: "we weren't intending to make light of a serious situation. We understand the sensitivity of this historic moment."
Re:The /. crowd is no better (Score:0, Interesting)
That's pretty tacky, but now, just over nine years later, I think it's hilarious.
Eternal September begins on Twitter. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see this as someone making light of a bad situation. I see it more as an expression of capitalism -- 'Someone's gotta make money off this'.
With that in mind, there's a lot of analogues to Cantor and Seagal [wikipedia.org], who in 1994 launched the first mass Usenet spam. In hindsight it was surprising that nobody thought to do it before them. If you have a bunch of people talking in a public, unmoderated forum with a specific topic, why not (aside from good manners) drop advertisements on those people?
Twitter is now where Usenet was in 1994 -- lots of people, talking in public, unmoderated 'hash tag' discussion threads. Of course people are going to spam those threads with ads. There will be outrage over it, but if it proves profitable it'll become more prevalent. Spam could potentially flood the signal out of some long-standing hash tag discussions. If that happens, Twitter will go the way of Usenet.
Kenneth Cole is just the first person in Twitter's upcoming Eternal September [wikipedia.org]. Don't hate him, he or someone like him was fated to appear eventually.