Careful with that hashtag: new pilot program allows you to buy stuff with Tweets

Twitter is many things: comedy device, college major, a tool that makes us hyper-connected. But now a new pilot program has the potential to turn Twitter into the world’s first 140 character or less mall, according to the Wall Street Journal. Twitter and American Express have partnered up on a program that allows users to add their credit card information to their account and then buy items from vendors simply with a tweet. If you sign up for this one, you’ve gotta be extra-careful with those tweets now.The Journal notes that the program is still in the early stages and when it starts up in a couple of days, users will be able to buy Amex gift cards, Kindles and jewelry. Twitter sees it as a way to get a revenue from something other than ads while Amex sees it as a way to expand their reach with merchants. We see it as a way to speed up drunken purchases that you really wish you could take back. It’ll make for some interesting customer service calls when people claim their account was hacked and that’s why they tweet-bought the new One Direction album. And who knows, maybe they’ll be right, given Twitter’s recent problems with security.