(Screencap: YouTube)

Shooting off some borderline-rude half-baked review of a product or service is kind of a Twitter rite of passage; the platform would simply cease to exist if crochety tweets were suddenly outlawed. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that your anti-iPhone 5 tweets are actually being used by competitors to mount compelling advertising campaigns. Hey, at least you're not just shouting into a void? (You're mostly shouting into a void.)

While this might be a good time to remind yourself that no matter how few followers you have, your tweets are indeed public, the off-hand remarks of dissatisfied customers are being harnessed to create ads that are actually pretty funny and realistic. Take Samsung's anti-iPhone ad, a Betabeat favorite, which includes classic iPhone hipster lines like "Yeah, yeah but they make the coolest adapters." The Journal reports that that ad was partly sourced from anti-iPhone tweets.

Of course, ad agencies are being careful not to reflect the opinions of a very vocal minority, also known as "people with Svbtle blogs."

The Web "is like a fun-house mirror in that it gives you some great real-time feedback, but it is skewed because not everyone speaks and those who do tend to speak a lot, so you do have to be careful in how you use it," one digital media agency exec told the Journal.

If ad agencies get too Twitter-heavy, we might end up with a bunch of whiny commercials that resemble SNL's "Tech Talk" sketch.