Good Week
Twitter. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, to co-opt the refrain of Edwin Starr’s famous anti-war song for a popular view of the web-based communications service. But the short-post, real-time messaging system came into its own last week when several Yahoo staffers provided live updates of their redundancy processes. Ryan Kuder’s Twitter updates did not want for details: “Y1 layoffs today… On the plus side my commute just got shorter… Walking around saying goodbye… Dammit. I was hoping to hook up the free Flickr Pro account before I got canned… Signing off from Yahoo… Celebrating unemployment with a giant margarita.”

Bad Week
Losing a laptop is bad enough but things get a lot worse when you’re stuck with a $54m lawsuit afterwards. US electronics retail chain Best Buy misplaced the laptop of Raelyn Campbell. Campbell took the device back to a Best Buy store when an on/off button failed. The machine was then lost and Best Buy offered $900 in compensation, a sum that was below the original cost of the machine. Things escalated after Ms Campbell contacted her local law firm. By adding on the fact that tax return details were on the system, the allegation that Best Buy hadn’t alerted authorities over the risk of identity theft and so on, the total suit amounted to $54m. Enough to buy a new, state-of-the-art laptop and to have some change spare.

Word of the Week
Fraternity. Dell is to pay a cool $155m in cash for MessageOne, an email backup company. That’s good news for Michael Dell’s brother Adam who co-founded the company. The Dell family, including Michael’s wife Susan, are also investors in funds that part-own MessageOne, a firm based in Austin, Texas, home to Dell. That’s what you call a tight-knit family.