Twitter can serve quite a few really nice purposes, but you still need to be careful what you actually send out there. You should be careful of what you tweet even if you think you are completely in the right and someone else is completely in the wrong. One female developer learned this the hard way after she tweeted a picture and some comments that a couple of guys made in her vicinity. Adria Richards says that a group of men were talking about a “dongle” which is a device that plugs into a computer. Richards said the men were talking about having a “big dongle” in a sexually suggestive way.

Richards took a photo of the men and posted their comments on her Twitter (News - Alert) account. It wasn’t long until the organizers of the conference that Richards and the men who were attending got the group together to talk about the incident. According to the organizers, the men admitted that they were making lewd comments and apologized to Richards.

That should have been the end of the situation, but it turns out that a couple of companies decided what happened needed further action. Richards was fired from her job with SendGrid. The company is a tech firm located in Orange (News - Alert) County with offices in Colorado. The company’s CEO Jim Franklin wrote on the company blog that while he agreed with Richards’ right to report the incident, he didn’t agree with publicly shaming them on Twitter.

"Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line," Franklin wrote in a blog post on the site. "Publicly shaming the offenders — and bystanders — was not the appropriate way to handle the situation."

Franklin said that Richards’ actions had put his business at risk and divided the company. He said he didn’t believe that Richards could effectively do her job anymore. She wasn’t the only one who ended up losing her job. One of the offending males in the situation was identified by the company he worked for and was also fired.