From time to time, people post tweets guided by strong emotions. By default, tweets are public and anyone, anywhere can instantly see your updates. This may lead to consequences that can be harmful to one’s personal and professional life.
FireMe! monitors Twitter and collects tweets from people who supposedly hate their jobs, or want to kill their bosses or coworkers. These tweets are displayed on the FireMe! site. In addition, FireMe! analyses the sentiment of the tweets, in order to calculate a user’s ’firemeter’ score. The FireMe! leaderboard features those users with the highest scores and who are most likely to get fired.
In a short period of three weeks, FireMe! sent out 4304 tongue-in-cheek warnings. 249 people deleted their questionable tweet within two hours. Further analysis of the tweets showed that job-haters usually have a small number of followers and use more profane language.
FireMe! is developed by Ricardo Kawase and colleagues at the L3S Research Center in Hannover, Germany. The work will be presented at the Web Science conference in Paris in April, 2013.
The team believes that young or inexperienced users would certainly benefit from post-hoc privacy alerts and warnings like FireMe! “Potential dangers of personal, negatively loaded tweets remain abstract for most users, until the damage has been done”.
FireMe! (fireme.l3s.uni-hannover.de)
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Referral paper: Ricardo Kawase, Bernardo Nunes, Eelco Herder, Wolfgang Nejdl and Marco Antonio Casanova. Who Wants To Get Fired? Proceedings ACM Web Science Conference, Web Science 2013, WebSci’13, Paris, France, May 2-4, 2012.
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In the media:
Are you about to get fired because of your Twitter account?
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300011/Are-fired-Twitter-account-This-new-app-warn-advance.html
FireMe! App Tracks Boss-Hate On Twitter
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/26/fireme-twitter-app_n_2955641.html
FireMe! Twitter alert says you’ve overstepped the mark
www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2013/03/fireme-twitter-alert.html
Will That Tweet Get You Fired? This App Warns You
mashable.com/2013/03/26/fire-me-app-twitter/
FireMe! Twitter Service Makes Getting Fired Way Easier
www.geekosystem.com/fire-me-twitter/
Video coverage:
krdo: FireMe! App flags fireable tweets
www.krdo.com/news/FireMe-App-flags-fireable-tweets/-/417220/19568398/-/g52t4lz/-/index.html
CNN: Twitter tool saves you from yourself
edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/tech/2013/03/28/exp-twitter-tool-amanpour.cnn
FireMe! App Shows Tweets Trash Talking Bosses
www.newsy.com/videos/fireme-app-shows-tweets-trash-talking-bosses/
Ricardo Kawase 