We could be sarcastic here, but we’re a little too flabbergasted to really pull it off. Yes, American Express and Twitter are partnering to sell your stuff over Twitter. Yes, the service will use hashtags.
And yes, we can see a lot of ways this can go horribly wrong, too.
To be fair, it’s not like you put a link and tag it #Iwantthat, and Amex just puts it on your card. You have to take a few steps in order to actually buy something or, more likely, get trolled by a fifteen-year-old. Here’s the standard-issue twee video about a date that every Internet product is required to have under federal law to show the concept:
Buying stuff is only half of the program. The other half is basically online coupons that you have to tweet about in order to get.
It’s easy to see where the concept is coming from: Groupon and offer sites are still popular, if staggering financially lately, and American Express has been engaged in an aggressive push to get people to use their cards more often, trying to play down their snooty image and engaging in a recent offer program with Microsoft over the Xbox 360.
On the other hand, you do have to wonder how sensible the “buying things” portion of this program actually is. While it won’t be easy for hackers to steal stuff, it may not exactly be difficult for a troll to decide 15,000 of his closest Twitter friends need to buy TVs for themselves right now.
But hey, we’re sure nothing of that magnitude will happen. Twitter is totally secure! Absolutely! Honest.