Can Twitter be used as a dating app? The platform’s users “tend to feel strongly” either way, says Miles Klee in Mel magazine. One of the naysayers’ arguments is the number of people (usually men) sending lecherous messages to those they’d never stand a chance of matching with on Tinder or Hinge. Then there’s the “obvious downside” that if you’re flirting on a public Twitter thread, it’s laid out “for millions of gawkers to see”, like “hardcore PDA in a Burger King at 2am. Nobody wants that.”
That said, there have been “many, many dates, sexual assignations and weddings” sparked by Twitter conversations. One man proposed to his wife on the platform in 2008. And the “clincher” in favour of Twitter as a dating app is the “bland “cookie-cutter” profiles you see on regular dating sites. You have to launch into conversations knowing next to nothing about your prospective date. On Twitter you can see “what’s on someone’s mind at random hours” – what they’re into and what they’re up to. It’s as close as the internet gets to “a chance introduction at a weird party”.
Silicon Valley’s messiest divorce
The seven-year divorce battle between Google billionaire Scott Hassan and Allison Huynh is a Silicon Valley “nasty”, says Michael Kaplan in the New York Post. Both went to Stanford, where Hassan wrote much of the code that powered Google for the tech giant’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in exchange for stock.
Earlier this year Huynh, 46, found a mysterious website, allisonhuynh.com, that contained lawsuits and salacious stories from her past. Hassan, 51, a “high-tech Dr Dolittle who can talk to computers”, admits he created the site “in a moment of frustration” – “I thought aggregating publicly available information without commenting or editorialising would help.”
When hired professionals failed to figure out the website’s origin, Huynh hacked it herself. “I stayed up all night and discovered a back door that Scott inadvertently did not close. I was able to determine that [the site] was registered by Scott Wendell – Scott’s middle name,” says Huynh, a senior research fellow at Stanford’s robotics laboratory. The email contact had “Hassan” in it. “So the genius of Silicon Valley was exposed by his wife, using her technical knowledge.”